I notice you're developing the title in 3D Flash.

LW: Yes, and it's true 3D, which will be most evident to a player when a new building is constructed; players are able to rotate new buildings freely after their taste before placing them somewhere on a map -- in my opinion it's the strongest improvement of our present technical milestone, as it so greatly enhances the personal experience of the game.

However, 3D powered by Flash is a young, emerging technology. Its current installments still have issues with raw processing speed of lots of polygons and true, accurate z-sorting. Coobico therefore still needs to resort to using isometric view and some 2D-sprites. The upside is that you will not need any special graphics hardware to enjoy Coobico.

You're also targeting over-30s! How do you plan on attracting them?

LW: The recent study of research firm Parks Associates revealed that a lot more people would play MMOs if they would be free to play. Casual free MMOs like Coobico appeal to a group of people, which is more than willing to take part in a casual game-world, but which would never have joined games like WoW in the first place -- just because they don't have the necessary time and commitment for these types of games. This target-audience is looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding.

It's important for us to build a community where you do not need a steep learning of spells, monsters and expected archetype-behavior to be able to engage with other players. We have quite a few viral features up our sleeves to enable users to share their gaming-experience outside Coobico, such as adding a permalink for profile pages of every structure, player- and non-player-avatar of the game.

So, how does a city-building MMO work?

LW: The essence of Coobico is city-building and socialization: you are building your individual settlement along your friends and competitors, which is persistent on the map and can freely be visited by everybody. Neighbors are not an abstract concept in Coobico -- they are players running settlements close to your own city; you can visit their village, and compete or collaborate with them.

To grow your village, you need to gather resources to construct new buildings (or invite friends to invest resources in your construction-sites), which in turn are utilized to recruit non-player-settlers. Settlers will populate the village, pay taxes and affect the traits of the settlement, like food-consumption, wellbeing, corruption and so on. Players will be able to pepper their competitors' villages with hazardous buildings (like haunted graveyards) which will take their toll on a settlement's traits as well.

Settlers will occasionally offer quests to players, chosen from a broad range of activities, like decorating their building or exploring a nearby dungeon.

We are trying to create a varied cycle of tasks to keep players involved with a gaming-experience unique to their own liking.

How do you plan to monetize Coobico?

LW: A multitude of so-called "free-to-play"-MMOs are currently competing on the market, which have coined the term "free" to describe that every item and activity of an open online-world will cost a small fee. Coobico is going to be "free-to-play" too, but essentially and completely free of charge. In-game currency can be obtained either by playing the game (growing your settlement, hunting for treasures and so on) or by micro-transactions (for those with limited time).

Our revenue-model is advertisement-based. I hope that players are by all means going to accept this, if done properly. Think in the line of branded items and events.

What's your opinion on the battle between free-to-play and subscription models?

LW: It's a battle between two models of equally valid legitimacy, because they both aim at different audiences. Subscriptions stick better with hardcore-players, who will squeeze the max out of their subs by playing as much as possible; micro-transaction are more attractive to casual gamers, as they allow for a "play-as-you-go"-approach.

While subscription-based games tend to force each other out of the market, free-to-play titles can more easily coexist. To me, this is the main reason why we will see much more free-to-play MMOs in the coming months and years.

Are there any titles you specifically see as competitors?

LW: The current explosion in social worlds is going to raise the overall quality of the whole industry. A lot of the other online-worlds are tapping new target-groups, thus helping to increase the size of the market as a whole and to raise the awareness for our industry of both our audience and our potential sponsoring partners.

I don't mind competition at all, especially since Coobico's genre-mix is unparalleled. There are titles offering similar game-play, like The Settlers and MySims, but collect-and-build-games are typically not massive social worlds at heart. Social worlds like Habbo Hotel on the other hand resemble other aspects of Coobico, but they are not essentially multiplayer-games.