Coraabia is an online MMO trading card game with RPG elements developed by Czech indie studio ARK8. Set in a living sci-fi multiverse whose development players can directly influence, the gameplay of Coraabia challenges the basic tenets of the genre. Lead developer Jakub Hussar describes how crowd-sourcing led to collaboration with 450 artists from 65 countries and how time-consuming the upkeep for an indie MMO game is.
Creation of a Concept
The story of Coraabia started in 1996, when my 10-year-old self came up with its core gameplay elements during a seaside vacation. Then, after a decade of playing with home-made cards, me and my schoolmates and friends decided to establish game studio ARK8 and began developing a browser version of Coraabia. At first, we were polishing the gameplay in a special beta-testing van that toured our native city of Budweis and picked up any volunteers eager to try Coraabia out. In parallel, we were working on a complex story background including the planet Coraab and its surrounding multiverse. The whole idea behind Coraabia was to create a living world whose history would develop in real-time just like ours. All the while, the simple rules of the game would make it easily accessible even to players new to trading card games. As they would progress in the game and develop their Coraabian alter-ego, hundreds of cards and unlockable perks would offer boundless deck-building opportunities suitable even for seasoned trading card games veterans.
Learning the Hard Way
As we all come from various backgrounds except game development, we ran into few dead ends along the way. We reworked the entire interface and the visuals of the cards twice. It took us six years to polish an intuitive system of displaying cards’ abilities without the need to use any text at all. Because of our never-ending push to balance the game, some cards have already seen their 12th iteration. We had to revamp the entire concept of the game’s single-player campaign after our player community got their hands on it. Such moments were especially important, as keeping in touch with our players is the best source of honest feedback we could hope for. After more than 2 million games already played in Coraabia, we know our players have a pretty good grasp on which mechanics work and which do not. They each offer their individual perspective that together form a clear picture of what has to be done to push Coraabia closer to perfection.
Community is Essential
Many players have went the extra mile and dedicated their own free time to help develop a game they love by joining our team. Eventually, 40 externists and volunteers started working on Coraabia, be it by writing flavor texts for characters, testing new features, or balancing the gameplay. Therefore, effectively managing the whole team is a daunting challenge, especially since members of ARK8 themselves are spread across the entire Czech Republic. We have a small office in Prague (aka The Vat) where we personally meet for work sessions from time to time. Yet the bulk of the development is carried over chat groups and regular video calls. The externists and volunteers then form smaller units that are supervised by an ARK8 member. We have a flavor unit (volunteers working on writing character flavor texts and progressing the game story), a stage server testing unit and so on. The upkeep plan is formed months in advance based on input of ARK8 members as well as volunteers to make sure everyone’s voice can be heard and that everyone understands the reasoning behind the eventual design decision. This model also pretty much means someone is working on Coraabia at every moment of the day. Server crashes at three in the morning? Some volunteer is there to notice and make sure to inform a responsible team member so the downtime is as short as possible. Free time is a relative term in Coraabia‘s development, a reason why some of us treat it as a life mission (and a reason why our friends often joke we are more of a sect than a company). As Tu (the Coraabian year) lasts only two months, we gather six times per year on so-called Rokha’Tu parties where the entire team - and any interested players - gets the opportunity to meet, bond, and celebrate Coraabian New Year.
A Case Study in Crowdsourcing
There is one aspect that makes Coraabia stand out in the entire game industry, possibly even making it a Guinness World Record candidate: the game includes artworks from almost 450 artists from 65 countries of the world. This number was made possible only because we were not afraid to address some big names. We started by browsing social networks for freelance artists like deviantART or CGHub and picked artworks that had a feel that would fit our vision of Coraabia. This was an arduous process - we have skimmed over 1 million artworks by now, picking over 1 thousand of them to be used in the game. This level of detail was necessary to make sure the whole visual side would form a single compact piece. We were very positively surprised that even at this very start, great artists like Pascal Blanché or Johann Bodin were eager to share their artistic gems with us. Their personal agreement to allow usage of their pieces in an unknown indie project somewhere from Central Europe started a snowball effect. As more and more artists joined this pledge, new ones started to take it as an honor to join such an elite club. As a result, today’s list of Coraabia artists includes names that work on Hollywood blockbusters, as well as bestselling video games. Thus, the visual side of Coraabia is a truly unique blend of different styles and artistic visions that is nevertheless held together by a single overarching sci-fi theme.
The Crucible of Upkeep
April 2013 was a crucial milestone for ARK8 - we finally launched the Czech open beta. Having your game out in the open is not only a joy, though, especially if it’s a living MMO and you’re a small indie studio. As more and more AAA projects position themselves as perpetual betas despite being pretty much finished games, players have rightly started to expect all open betas to be fully-working professional endeavours. Nevertheless, these expectations mean a time-consuming upkeep is inevitable, even though you need to spend time on actually finishing the game first. A game like Coraabia is not an app you can fire-and-forget - it’s like your digital baby that needs constant care. Still, we decided to launch Coraabia in this “early access” mode because we wanted to hear direct feedback from a broader selection of players. There are always some elements you can never fully test in a small bubble. As a game where PvP plays a major part, balancing Coraabia would not be possible without letting the players try to break it in half in order to out-compete others. To handle the upkeep more easily, we feed the upkeep pipeline with large chunks of finished work at once so that our focus is not constantly split between upkeep and development. Of course, with some team members shifting more towards upkeep-oriented content creation, others had to step up and fill the vacancies where needed by learning new competencies. This boosted redundancy makes the whole project more stable since some tasks are no longer tied to a single team member. The upside to the woes of upkeep is that having to treat the Czech beta as if the game was already on the world market is a great preparation for handling the world release itself. Plus, it’s not like the development of new features will stop in the next few years. Since opening the beta in 2013, we have already implemented tournament play, started a card bazaar where players trade cards among themselves, and have completely reworked the RPG system of perks and quests. The to-do list will be still pretty long even after the world release. As Coraabia is such a complex project, it begs for new add-ons and improvements, nevermind the hundreds of cards we have already prepared for the upcoming years.
Immersion is the Future
When we see how the few thousand core fans started writing their own short stories or comic strips from Coraabia, how they started using Coraabian language, expressions, and memes in their in-game interactions, and role-play their decisions in the game as the story unwinds according to their actions, we know there is a demand for immersive game like Coraabia among players. The community constantly uncovers new secrets and trivia through hundreds of character flavor texts and story-driven quests. The immersion is augmented by the existence of a Coraabian language as well as the constantly changing geopolitical situation in Coraabia. It takes time to create a game world that would immerse its players, but we think that if Coraabia achieved that in the genre of trading card games, where the connection between the player and the in-game character is mostly abstract and indirect, it can also work in other genres that are traditionally not that immersive. That is why we believe Coraabia brings fresh air to the entire trading card games genre and why we are sure Coraabian mythology will make its way to films, books, and other forms of artistic expression.
Coraabia will open the gates of its beta for the world public at this Fall. The game will work in desktop browsers and will be free to play, with all its content accessible purely through gameplay. Follow the game’s progress on its Twitter and Facebook.
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