Project & Story

This entry might be getting a bit technical (doh!), but let me share a bit about our favorite weapon of choice to power 3D in Coobico:

3D in Flash had remained in relative obscurity until last year, because Actionscript was just not fast enough to power more than some bland, unimpressive 3D-scenes. However, with the advent of AS3, Flash made a major leap. Around February 2008, the three most ubiquitous open-source 3D-engines Papervision, Away3D and Sandy3D published their recent installments, which lead to an explosion in the usage of 3D in Flash. For Coobico, I made an in-depth assessment of these three engines shortly thereafter, to decide which one would be most suitable to our creative vision and our production pipeline from 3D to Flash. 

Sandy3D is the oldest of the frameworks, one of its branches is even available for AS2. Papervision, being a bit younger, was available in its effects- and “Great White"-branches up until now, but it was announced that both branches will be merged into Great White shortly. Away3D originally was a Papervision-derivative, but made some impressive improvements on its own after breaking with Papervision.

In fact, Away3D offers one of the most powerful packages of the three: it comes with a lot of features, shaders and the most different types of parsers (notably an .obj-parser), and does a very good job with z-sorting. However, I found various in-depth tasks (like re-assigning textures on the fly) a bit counter-intuitive to me. Talking about textures, phong-shading of rectangular shapes can lead to funny results, due to triangulation issues (i.e. one polygon of a shape is shaded while the other one stays unshaded). The biggest let-down of Away3D might be the lack of documentation (as usual). By the time I was checking it out, it was hard to find any documentation for any of the in-depth features--I finally decided against Away3D, cause there was not enough time to rummage through tons of undocumented classes, just to find out what they might actually be doing. Please notice though, that this is already a few months ago: if documentation of Away3D has improved in the meantime, I would highly recommend it, if you want to get into 3D.

Papervision, even though having earned a good reputation with a large community of developers, was a bit of a let-down to me in the end. It was lacking a few of the standard-features of the other two competitors, namely native support of 3D-sound and 2D-sprites. Phong-shading had the same problems as Away3D. Again, this was a few months ago, and I didn’t checked back in the meantime. It might very well be that PV3D has already implemented more features in the meantime.

Sandy, last but not least, is not as hyped as Away and PV3D, but its thorough set of features and rendering-capabilities is on par with Away3D (even though it admittedly needs to improve its z-sorting). All of its packages are very well documented, with quite a few tutorials available, because this engine is around just for such a long time already. Maybe this is also a reason why I felt that understanding Sandy was most easy and intuitive. Then there is a neat feature to turn down the quality of shapes from triangular to rectangular, which eliminates shading-artefacts of boxes, very important for Coobico.

Ultimately, I decided that Coobico would be developed with Sandy, because it felt most compatible. There are other solutions like Sharikura, which seemingly encompasses all other engines, but which is not yet publicly available, and Alternativa, a commercial solution, which yet has to prove if it can handle very large scenes with animations. 

This list is by no means exhaustive. Please feel free to leave a comment if you know another noteworthy 3D-engine.

More free-to-play games - not subscription-based titles - are needed to attract new players in order to grow the market; that’s the conclusion of a recent consumer study conducted by research firm Parks Associates:

“The study’s numbers show that 14% of gamers currently not playing MMORPGs would be interested in playing them if they could for free, while only 2% of gamers from the same group were interested in playing an MMORPG requiring subscriptions.
According to Parks Associate’s director of broadband and gaming, Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, the barriers to entry with subscription-based MMORPGs, such as time and money, are too high for potential customers.”(Worlds in Motion)

Wow, 14%… there’s a target-group. Actually, we already talked about this last year in response to an assumption of Guild Wars co-founder Jeff Strain “You must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community”...
“Winter disagrees. “Instead, how about catering to a new target-group which never stuck with a traditional MMO in the first place?” He suggests.” -- sorry for quoting myself.

With our first screenshot-gallery out of the door, some may have already recognized something from the shots: Coobico is going 3D.

When development of Coobico started more than 15 months ago, the social game was envisioned as a pure 2.5D tile-based game, in the ballpark of Habbo, Dofus and the like. The power of Flash CS3 was quite unforseeable at that moment, let alone the development of 3D powered by Flash. Fast forward to summer 2008, a lot of really incredible 3D-frameworks have sprung up in the meantime: open-source solutions like Papervision, Away3D, and Sandy3D, as well as commercial products like the really outstanding Alternativa Platform (kudos!).

Since Coobico should be poised to push the envelop of flash-gaming, we finally made the (not entirely easy) decision to scrap our codebase and project-plan and port everything to Flash-3D. Some visitors at our blog already seriously asked when Coobico is going public, since the original beta-release date was set to April. The answer is, that the past 3 months kept us busy switching to 3D, rewriting most of the codebase, editing artwork, creating new maps and textures, just to name a few things, and the work is not finished yet. A new release-date will be issued as soon as we have adapted our project-plan. 

What does all this mean to the game itself? Everything will stay pretty much the same: Coobico will still be playable in Flash without any additional client-downloads. It will still be completely free to play. But its new 3D-capabilities now allow for zooming in and out of a scene, as well as turning around a building freely before placing it. We feel that this is a great improvement to the gameplay and makes exploration of the island much more exciting.

So please bear with us a little bit longer, we will keep you posted here, as usual.

You may have noticed the nice big button to the right, which points to our brand-new screenshot-gallery. The gallery contains a selection of screenshots of Coobico’s current alpha-version, depicting typical city-, outdoor-, and dungeon-locations encountered on Qubus’ Island. Make sure you check them out leave us your comment.

You can also find the links to the images at our pages at Flickr and Delicious.

Lo and behold, we are presently extending this blog by knocking together a screenshot-gallery, which is going to be available at the end of the week. Stay tuned please…

The Game Developers Conference has opened submission for the 11th Independent Games Festival (IGF), which is going to take place in March 2009 in San Francisco. Submission deadline is November 1st (participants of the Student Competition got two more weeks time).
Last year’s winners were Kloonigames with Crayon Physics Deluxe (Grand Prize), and 2d Boy with World of Goo (Design Innovation and Technical Excellence).

via Gamasutra

Coobico’s main USP is to offer true multiplayer-citybuilding, where settlements are not instanced (something that rarely has been done yet, no?), which poses the challenge of settlements rampantly growing. The game therefore offers two strong incentives to counter urban sprawl: first, we lately threw a settlers’ need for community into the mix--townies will get unhappy if their next neighbors are settled too far away (remember to keep your villagers happy to keep them from leaving your city). What’s more, we gave the mechanism of initial building-costs a slight nudge--up until now construction costs would depend on a land-value which was calculated according to the specific location of a new construction-site. However, this game-mechanism was prone cheating (if such land-value is transfered between server and client). It’s now put on the scrap heap and replaced with a dynamic cost which depends on the distance of a new building from your initial town-hall. This will encourage a tighter and more circular layout of settlements, while still allowing for more peculiar and outstretched types of villages (which are just going to be a slightly bit more expensive). 

In my humble opinion software-patents are something evil; they get in the way of great, universally valid interfaces and cut down on healthy competition. Now, Robert Bloomfield at Terra Nova recently reported about several software-patents filed in the US in the general field of MMOs and virtual economies, sigh…
Both commenters and Samuel Weis of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) critically note that patents will not be issued in the case of prior art, but I am not so optimistic; during the past two years, especially both the Friendster- and Jaipuria-patents in the field of socnets demonstrated that very dominant patents will be issued all the same, blatantly in the face of prior art which already existed years ago. Let’s see how things are going to work out, keep fingers crossed…

Yesterday SOE announced that it would like to herald a second spring for its classic MMORPG Everquest: according to Kotaku, SOE promoted “new program called “Living Legacy,” through which EQ subscribers with inactive accounts who left with all their bills in order can come back from now until the end of July - totally for free.
Returning players also get the EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark compilation plus bonus items at no cost, and they can keep it all if they convert to a paying subscription”

While Everquest was always a noteworthy MMO and a lot of gamers still associate quite a few happy memories with EQ (according to commenters), it is obvious that Everquests popularity plateaued and declined in the past 4 years or so, and eventually was superseded by WoW.

Will Everquest then be able to compete with concurrent titles like WoW and AoC by just riding on a wave of nostalgia? Probably not with a subscription based business model. In contrast to micropayment-driven MMOs which can more easily co-exist, subs-based online worlds anyhow are somewhat squeezing each other out of the market, as players are likely to max out the time they spend on a single title to get the most of their monthly payment. 

Upon reaching achievement level 3, players can pick up a settlers’ quest and thus start to build their own settlement--or associate themselves with an already existing village. New cities are founded as private per default, which means new settlers can join this settlement only on invitation by its founder. There are also public cities which can be joined freely without permission; such cities are mainly NSC-run, like the harbor-village which builds the starting point of every new arrival. It is not yet fully decided if players can decide to start their new settlement as public, too. Opinions, anybody?