Project & Story

Another aspect under construction is Coobico’s roleplaying part. As of version 0.4 we are orienting this more heavily towards tactical roleplaying—which here means to be able to control more than one character on a quest to solve problems (as opposed to the standard MMORPG-formula of one player, one character). We already abandoned the unnecessary division of having one player-character (which can be controlled directly) and keeping a population of settlers (not directly controlled).
Players will be able to choose any of their settlers to manually control them and go exploring. Each settler has a set of skills at her disposal; players can choose which settlers they want to take along on a quest, to control which skills will be available in a dungeon.

We are currently doing some low-level work for Coobico’s alpha-release 0.4, e.g. completing the quest-system. Besides that, one item on our long laundry list is overhauling the mechanism of upgrading and populating buildings. As of version 0.3 “upgrade-slots” for a building got available automatically after some amount of time (a slot could then be turned into something productive). We finally decided to let players upgrade their buildings entirely manually, according to their own pace and preference; the old system probably would have puzzled Coobico’s novice players (“why is nothing happening here?“), while it would have unnerved the more hardcore players (“why the heck do I need to wait?“).
As of version 0.4, buildings can be upgraded at any time according to the players’ own pace. Also, we are raising the prices for constructing a new building, but any new building will come “pre-equipped” with a settler (eliminating the need of manually recruiting a settler at each newly constructed, empty building).

Thanks to everybody who followed our website faithfully, this humble development blog recently crossed the mark of 1 million page hits since we started out. Thanks from the Coobico Team for dropping by and for your continued interest in our work.

A major makeover we’ve been busy with during the past months is Coobico’s character-system. During the first two installments we were going for a classic roleplayingish approach, where you control a single character, full-stop. After updating and fixing the city-building part of the game (and during our current work on Coobico’s quest-system) we felt this approach increasingly out of touch—it created an unnecessary division of (one) player character and a player’s various (nsc-)settlers. During the past months we started implementing a different gameplay, which nudges Coobico a bit more into the corner of tactical roleplaying games, effectively allowing you two play as each of your settlement’s inhabitants. You take control of a settler with a mouse-click to activate the character for manual control and can then move the settler around (for purposes of exploration or questing)—of course all settlers have their own set of skills you need to take into account during battles etc. Manually controlled settlers will earn experience points which in turn raises their skills—but they will not produce/harvest any goods and resources while on a quest (fair enough, huh?) 

A nice (and true) citation from Warhammer Online’s Associate Producer Joshua Drescher:
“Seventy-five percent of the titles on the market that claim to be ‘MMO’ are actually single-player or limited group-oriented games that just happen to have lots of other people running around, doing the same things and having no impact on one another. In my view, to truly be a ‘massively multiplayer’ experience, the extant population of the game world has to have some sort of impact on you – regardless of whether or not they’re in your raid group or guild. Otherwise, you’re basically just regarding those thousands of other people as window dressing and they might as well be NPCs at that point…“

Read all comments on the genre and the term MMO of various developers after the jump.

MMO markets, especially in the US and South-Korea are saturated, that is the opinion of J. Mark Hood, co-founder of Seattle-based free-to-play MMO company Reality Gap, as reported by Gamasutra:

“I think it is saturated here, and I think there’s a real simple reason why most people [release free-to-play games],... the basic reason is—how do you compete with [the massive budgets] that Activision Blizzard and EA are doing right now? Unless you have a huge company and a huge amount of capital, there are not a lot of ways to do that.“

I think that quite a few game-developers would strongly disagree, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many newcomers throwing their hats into the ring. I don’t want to sound old-schoolish, but what is the definition of a saturated market? It means that the whole population already has a bought a certain product (i.e. nearly everybody owns a car) and new products will not be sold unless the population grows or the old products break down (or in case of car-manufacturers, if your government springs for a cash for clunkers program).
As for the MMO-industry, there is no reliable data on how many more newbies might get into playing MMOs or how many MMO-players will adopt a second, third or more MMOs, depending on the commitment of time and money those games demand. Also, there is no way to predict how many small-scale game-developers will close down and how many newcomers will show up. Taking all these uncertainties in account, I would say that the markets are far from saturated and there is probably plentiful of opportunities. What Mark probably meant was that “currently there is quite a lot of competing game-developing companies”—but of course, that wouldn’t have made a nice headline.

From my point of view the MMO industry is currently (and for the next few years) in the stage of growth. That is why we see an explosion of new F2P-games; which is quite good for the industry as a whole, because it might get more customers interested in the field and help to speed up the production- and market-cycle (which is currently very slow, because it just takes so much time to make a MMO.)
But if you surf through lists of F2P-MMOs, you are often greeted with dead links, even for games which were published just last year. There will be more consolidation to come in the next years as the industry transitions to the stage of maturity.

My two cents about what will happen next: besides all developers getting more boot-strapped, it will very probably depend on the type of the business-model of each game. Blockbuster- subscription-based-games will compete in price (increased production values, but decreased time-to-market and lower distribution-costs and increased competition). This is eventually also true for free-to-play games which are purely based on micro-transactions. As for free, ad-based games like Coobico, it will be a fight for quality (as your price can’t get lower than zero) and for more relevancy for more members (to get better advertisement deals.)

The gallery is now updated with a bunch of new up-to-date screenshots—please take a look after the jump.

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…