Monthly Archives: October

Recently I sat down with Worlds in Motion to talk about Coobico’s latest technical milestone, the nuts and bolts of the game and casual gaming in general. Read the interview after the jump.

We are currently adding another game-mechanic to the mix: technological achievements, which can be compared to Technologies of Sid Meier’s Civilization-series; a tech achievement is a cultural groundwork for certain types of new buildings you might want to add to your settlement. It also acts as modifier for the settlement’s stats like taxes, community, waste, enlightenment and so on. We originally tried to avoid to have a tech-tree, but it turned out that such mechanic just helps to keep track of the general development status of a settlement; it also empowers players to choose into which direction they want to take their village when competing against other players.

Coobico does not try to compete with Civ though; we have thinned down our tech achievements to the following short list:

Mixed Farming: One of the basic achievements which enables farm-buildings.
Brewing: allows for building a tavern and raises the settlement’s food-supply.
Mining & Quarrying: enables mines, but also raises the level of pollution.
Coinage: raises both the amount of tax and crime and is necessary to build a merchant.

Militia: required for building a guard-tower, and reduces the crime-rate a bit.
Craft: enables workshops and raises the level of enlightenment.
Chemistry & Pharmacy: necessary for building a healer.
Middle Class: required for both building a healer and a scholar. Middle class will both raise a village’s tax- and pollution-rate.

These two techs are negative achievements which lead to the construction of hazard-spots; Rites is required for building graveyards. Organized crime enables building a den of thieves. 

All of the above achievements can be obtained by either spending gold or accomplishing quests which grant tech achievement points.

A settlement needs stone as an ubiquitous resource. It’s necessary for building new structures and for keeping certain settlers happy (like the mason). Players will not always want to spend their time to manually grind for resources or dedicate their gold to buy stone at a merchant, likewise. At a mine you can therefore recruit a stonecutter. Consuming food, a stonecutter will steadily produce stone for your settlement—oh, and waste, of course…

In this nice piece at Gamasutra, former Firaxis lead designer Soren Johnson opines on the common pitfalls of strategy titles. It’s a nice read which I would summarize as: cut out the crap, focus on the important stuff and the variety of gameplay and open your source for modding—“Strategy games have a direct lineage from board games, and the fun of playing the latter comes from understanding the rules and mechanics of the game world and then making decisions that have consequence within that world.“

Most city-building titles (like the Anno-series) have in common that one building equals one population unit inhabiting that building. In Setters ROAE for example, upon constructing a woodcutter’s hut, a woodcutter will immediately show up and go to work there.

This is going to work a slightly bit different in Coobico: each new building can serve as a hub to recruit several different citizens—a concept we borrowed from typical war-games like Battle for Middle-Earth or Company of Heroes, which works pretty good for a city-building game too, in our opinion.
The available citizens depend on the type of building and the level of techological achievements of the according settlement. Each new citizen will consume food, produce waste and pay different amounts of tax (higher ranking citizens will pay more to your coffers but make higher demands too). At a guildhall, for example, you can “build” a clothier or a blacksmith (besides the guildmaster) to produce either clothes or metal parts; it’s up to your own decision (and up to the economy and needs of your settlement) wich types of citizens you will recruit. Each building can only house a limited amount of inhabitants, though.

So far, we only introduced a handful of citizens, like the innkeeper, the scholar, or the farmer. More are to come soon, please stay tuned…

A Farmer works at a pasture or farm and produces the main supply of food of a settlement.