Concept-Art

Here are some of Coobico’s ubiquitous non-player-characters, from whom players can acquire quests; quests are an important part to Coobico, as they represent the players’ current tasks – from angling fishes for a local innkeeper, to digging out treasures, to building a new street or structure.
Upon completion of a quest the player earns in-game money and experience. What’s more, the avatar’s happiness-score is raised (players should always keep an eye on the current happiness of their avatars).



Judge Dantes
Can be found at the cityhall. Dr. Dantes acts a some kind of town council and issues new building permits and settlers’ quests to players.

Count Vrykulas
Dwells in the House on Haunted Hill with his hunchbacked deaf and mute manservant. The count is one of the island’s oldest inhabitants. In fact, nobody knows for sure how long he really resided there already. Rumour has it that Count Vrykulas puts a curse on his lesser fortunate guests every now and then.

Albert the Butler
Albert, Dr. Qubus old butler, occupies and maintains Qubus’ Mansion and its machines with a bulk of Q-Bots after their master’s disappearance in an alchemic accident. Albert also assists new players during their registration-process.

More NSCs to come in part two...

Besides its human settlers, Qubus’ Island is home to strange dwellers. Some of them are rumored to be created by Dr. Qubus in an alchemical mishap.
You can choose to play Coobico as one of the weird and wilful but friendly members of the mysterious tribe of stone-golems found on Qubus’ Island. These giants are rough and tough on their rocky hide, but soft inside their big hearts. They are towering more than ten feet tall and will be catered to with their own collection of accessoirs.





Meet the Q-Bots: they were created as industrious little helpers by the island’s former owner, Dr. Qubus. After his mysterious disappearance, Qubus’ bots got left behind, keeping his facilities in good shape and mining for valuables. Not exactly playable characters, Q-Bots are personally assigned to each player as an auxiliary and sidekick,  providing explanations and how-tos.

Here’s a sneak-peak on two Coobico-avatars. Members will be able to customize and clothe their characters from head to toe. New fashion will be coming up regularly and can be bought with in-game-currency. Virtual accessoirs in Coobico will follow concurrent fashion-trends closely.

Comparable to a (lightweight) roleplaying-game, avatars are defined by stats. The two most important will be Happiness and Achievement: Achievement records the earned experience and serves as a highscore. Certain activities on Qubus’ island will only be unlocked for a player after reaching a certain achievement-level. Happiness is, well, the avatar’s happiness and current wellbeing, derived from a character’s activities.

At the steep northern shore lives one of the island’s oldest inhabitants on his haunted hill: Count Vrykulas. Rarely is the count’s haunted mansion found by visitors – his sporadic guests are challenged to a minigame. Count Vrykulas himself is considered as quite afraid of people, he only shows up at nighttime. Beware, the House on Haunted Hill is one of the places where avatars can get cursed (an in-depth article about curses is here).

Sports- and other minigames can be found in various places on Qubus’ Island by players looking for an extra challenge. Locations like the Haunted Mansion also serve as roleplaying-ish dungeons, which can be explored and looted. 

Citybuilding is a central part to Coobico’s gameplay, as its theme is to colonize Qubus’ Island. Players can build different types of buildings and public places like green spaces, comparable to series like SimCity and The Settlers.

Some structures will enable you to trade goods, harvest new resources or just play minigames.
A cityhall is one of more expensive and prolific buildings: while it does not add new essential functions, it has a great impact on the overall wellbeing of the city. At the cityhall players can meet the judge, who will issue new building permits.

Essentially being a Flash-based multiplayer-game, Coobico will take place in stunningly mind-boggling… isometric 2D. To put a good face on the matter: it’s a lightweight strategy-game with no retail box to purchase, no cumbersome client software to download and install and no nasty DRM. Just click and you’re in. Maybe you are, just like us, a sucker for stuff like World of Warcraft, but you just don’t have enough time for it. What’s more, we won’t require you to take a summercamp on how to play and navigate around on Qubus’ Island.




Although creating a 2D-game, we don’t want to settle with the regular vector- or pixel-look of most flash-games. We want to achieve a more contemporary look by using pre-rendered 3D-graphics for all backgrounds, buildings and avatars in Coobico. Every object and character is modeled first after numerous concept-sketches, rendered and then processed in Photoshop to be used as an in-game-graphic.
The source of inspiration for our work are mostly mangaesque console-games like Disgaea, Eternal Sonata and anime-titles like Koichi Chigira’s Rasuto Eguzairu (Last Exile).

More concept-sketches, renderings and screenshots are to come in this category soon.