Monthly Archives: May

A poorhouse is another important upgrade for healers and hospitals, essentially providing better public order and hygiene for a settlement. It also serves as a home for beggars who can be important for various quests.

Next up are the upgrades of healers and hospitals, one of the possible upgrades being a bath. At a bath, you can recruit a barber-surgeon who in turn raises both health and community of a settlement.

Coobico makes extensive use of Jack Doyle’s truly great TweenMax (which seems to be merged with the ubiquitous Grant Skinner’s gTween soon?). However, we were so impressed by the possible animated filter effects of newcomer-engine Tweensy by Shane McCartney that we quickly decided to add it to our toolkit. We had previously written and used a simple and rudimentary home-grown particle-engine which basically got the job done to animate necessary effects (like clouds of dust), but didn’t really offer any advanced features. Using Tweensy for this provides us with infinitely more visual candy now…   Tweensy allows for rendering effects to a bitmap if you need lots of particles and effects with dynamic filters.

We took a look at real 3D particles with Flint a few months ago, but Flint didn’t seem to play nice with Coobico’s engine—or maybe we chose a too early beta-release.

Each settlement in Coobico has its own character and style, as a creation of it’s player.
If it’s a town or just a hamlet it’s got to have its own Coat of Arms or badge to add some spice to its identity. Therefor we added a Coat Of Arms editor to the player’s choices while founding a new settlement. With this nifty tool it’s easily possible to create your city’s own Coat of Arms by using a variety of graphical elements. Different backgrounds, shield forms and motives can be combined and altered.
They are inspired by traditional designs as well as by fantasy and funny styles—Enjoy.

Guardtowers act as upgrades for several but not all types of structures (among them being merchants and garrisons). At a guardtower you can hire sentries to raise the general defensive value of your settlement—an important stat for events and interactions with other settlements.

Next we are going to introduce two upgrades for merchants: Warehouses and Guardtowers. A Warehouse is overseen by a Storekeeper and offers additional space to store resources—a simple but important add-on, because larger stock raises the probability of obtaining lower prices at the local merchant. Also, brimful stores with no additional warehouses have a higher chance to loose a part of their stock as the result of negative events (such as theft or fire).