Monthly Archives: August

We have nearly finished work on our current version of Coobico and are proud to present a few assorted screenshots from a bunch of new images which will be added to the gallery as quick as possible.

So what has changed so far? A lot of work went into implementing all changes to the gameplay we wanted to include. Coobico has evolved quite a lot from our very first conceptions, as you might imagine, if you have followed this blog.
Another big milestone was to change the underlying 3D-engine from Sandy3D to Away3D; we made this decision due to art-related reasons: our first 3D-installment of version 0.2 tried to mimic Coobico’s very first 2.5D-version (admittedly to try to save some work by re-using our first set of sprites). Finally, however, we decided to take better advantage of 3D and to make everything look a bit more realistic. At some point during last year, Away3D started to add features which helped us to create more natural looking environments on the fly (i.e. skin- and path-extrudes), hence the switch to Away. See the following screenshot to check out the difference.

Personally, I would still recommend Sandy3D wholeheartedly to anybody. After fiddling around with different 3D-engines for two years, I find that all choices offer very similar performance—it is recommended to choose a 3D-engine rather by its set of features and wether those features support you in what you are specifically trying to achieve.
Now, using skin-exrtrudes also helped us to create a 3D-world-map for Coobico, which is really much closer to what we have envisioned from the very beginning—take a look at the following screenshot.

The work is far from over yet, though, so we keep working under full pressure (e.g. to nail combat and questing on the head—so stay tuned.

Ten Ton Hammer runs a very interesting article by Cody Bye which tries to predict the future of MMOs by comparing it to the history of Hollywood—very worth reading:

“If you consider that MMOs take 3-5 years to make we’re really only on the third or maybe fourth generation of MMOs and the risks are very high now. The other problem is that it is hard to respond to market changes. If I discover today that players want  a certain type of game and I start making that, but it’s done 3-5 years from now, the whole market has shifted. We can see this happening now. There’s tons of WoW clones coming out now based on market demand set by WoW 4 years ago. So the question is, do players want something else now? If so, what? Do the players themselves even know? If you asked people in 1976 if they want an epic sci-fi movie I’m not convinced they would have said yes, and yet….“

Next up is a bunch of new screenshots, which we are going to include in our gallery, along some news of the current state of our work on Coobico. Stay tuned…