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Vision and Focus-Wizard 101

Nov 17, 2009 Articles Recommend|338views

As the Senior Director of Software Engineering at KingsIsle Entertainment, the independent developer behind Wizard101, I have a lot to say about MMO technology (and game technology in general). Before I dive into those details, I wanted to focus on a few higher level lessons - the ones I consider most important to the success of a project. In this installment, I’ll cover the lessons we learned the hard way and the scars to show for it. I’ve divided them into three major areas: Vision and Focus, Quality and Polish, and Pushing Beyond Expectations.

Vision and Focus

Every game starts with a Vision.

No, wait. Let’s be more specific. Every successful game starts with a Vision. Having a strong Vision is not a guarantee of success - not by a long shot - but NOT having one is a pretty clear indicator that you’re headed for disaster.

Case in point: Wizard101 and Shadowbane. Both had very clear, definable visions. Both games started with two things: an idea that could be easily explained, and a core team that was passionate about playing that Vision. Many times, on both projects but especially on Wizard, I heard people saying that the project “knows what it wants to be”. This is beyond critical. Does that mean that every detail of the game is known before hand? Absolutely not. Does that mean you won’t discover a more compelling emergent type of game play as you are working towards your goal? Again, no. But if you don’t have a clear Vision to start with, then you can quickly find yourself wandering aimlessly and losing the next most important factor: Focus (aka Scope).

Let’s take each game in turn.

Shadowbane. Vision? Check! Focus/Scope? Not so much. Honestly, we were all over the map. It’s not that we didn’t pick a few key areas in which to innovate, it’s that we weren’t willing to make the hard choices that followed. Here are a few of the areas that were innovative (or at least challenging):

• Dynamic World (build your own city, practically ANYWHERE in the 3D world. Pick a spot and flatten the terrain. Then layout your city walls, shops, houses, buildings, guard towers, patrol paths for your AI defenders, etc)
• Political map that updates in real time, as player cities are created and destroyed
• Flexible hierarchy system for guild management and oaths of fealty
• Non-humanoid player characters, flying characters
• Real-time multi-fractal terrain generation, so that an entire world could be generated with a few seed values. (UGH.)
• Massively, multi-threaded server architecture (ONE server for each realm)
• Seamless world, NO zoning, ever, etc.

In and of themselves, these ideas were innovative, compelling, interesting and… risky. Very, very risky. Because this is on top of the normal “heavy lifting” that is expected of an MMO: classes, races, leveling, inventory, spells, skills, attributes, death & respawning, trading, patching, etc., ad infinitum. Combine this with an inexperienced and underfunded team and you’ve got trouble brewing. Many experienced MMO teams aren’t able to capture the magic even on their second try. First time out of the gate? Don’t try and change the world (which, ironically, was Shadowbane’s tagline).

Attempting to innovate in too many areas is probably more risky than not innovating at all. Wizard101 has its own share of innovation. In particular, the turn-based, collectible card, cinematic combat system (wow, that’s a mouthful) worked out beautifully. Highly risky? Yes. But it paid off. How? By focusing our efforts on a controlled scope and polishing a smaller number of systems to perfection we were able to achieve a much higher level of quality in less time. Our game design team, lead by James Nance, deserves some major kudos here. As we brought on many experienced game developers, they were frequently stunned by the willingness of the design team to say simply say “No” to feature creep, or to make a small design compromise if it would greatly reduce code complexity. This is another critical point. Stay focused on what is fun to the end user, and don’t get hung-up on details that in the end will have very little qualitative impact on the game experience. Risk where you have to. Don’t go the Shadowbane route, decide that nothing is good enough and try to reinvent everything. You don’t have time to redo everything… and if you try, you’ll likely come up short in every area.

Quality and Polish

Another tenet that must resonate throughout the team is: Quality, Quality, Quality. Yeah, it seems obvious - but let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to hold to ideals when you’re not trudging through a mud-filled trench with artillery shells going off all around you (and if you don’t know why that analogy fits, you probably haven’t shipped an MMO- don’t worry, you’ll understand). The quality of the product cannot be sacrificed under any circumstances. Every developer (producers, artists, designers, sound and software engineers) needs to demand this of themselves long before they even submit an item into the game for testing. Just to be clear, this isn’t a turn-around from my earlier statement about Scope. Far from it; I’m not suggesting you need to match every other MMO out there feature-for-feature, but rather that the things you DO include need to be iterated over, tested, broken, redesigned, and redone. Make them work. Make them great. And if it can’t be great, cut it.

Admittedly, the pressure of an extremely large budget can cause both the publisher and the developer to rush a game into Beta (and launch). I’ve been there, believe me. But if you think the price tag is painful when you’re 90% of the way there, imagine how painful it will be if you ship too early and fail to make that money back. This seems to be a trend that has improved in the last few years, which is good, because the stakes are too high to continue shipping things that simply aren’t ready.

Shadowbane definitely rushed every aspect of game development, and this is something that in the end not only hurt the quality of the game, but I believe ultimately slowed down its development. Shadowbane had visibility in the online community from the moment the company launched, and while feedback from the community is essential, not having a long “quiet period” of solid development can be very detrimental.

Wizard101 took a very different approach. The project was started and developed in complete secrecy. In fact, its existence was not announced until it was time to start Beta testing. Even the attitude about what constituted an Alpha (and a Beta) was very clear, and very strict. Alpha meant that the game was feature complete, meaning the big remaining push was content. Beta was really more of a marketing effort than anything else, a final chance to polish and refine. Of course, some things still had to be tweaked. Some features had to be redesigned, some content was pushed to post-launch… but by aiming high we were able to focus on actual polish of the game, not core functionality. This also allowed us to finish our Beta testing in less than three months. The combat system, the aforementioned “risky feature” was iterated on numerous times over many years. We made (and fixed) our mistakes long before anyone outside the company even knew the game was in development. To be more specific, the 3D cinematic combat system was at the heart of our development process from the very beginning. It began as a hand drawn card game, then after a couple of months was turned into a 2D prototype, and finally in December of 2006 was fleshed out as a 3D Combat Milestone. This, in turn, was polished for nearly two more years before launch in September of 2008.

Pushing (far) Beyond Expectations

I feel as though the concepts I’ve conveyed up to this point are things I went into the development of Wizard101 already knowing based on my experience with Shadowbane. Some of them didn’t really solidify for me until later, during the development of Wizard101. But the final point for this installment is one that I feel as though I learned solely from my experience developing Wizard. The title of this section might lead you to believe that I’m talking about working hard, or maybe even crunching to build an MMO, but what I’m actually referring to is the ability to constantly question limits as you know them. The best example I have of this is the way that Wizard101 streams content down to the player. Wizard is NOT a small game. The total footprint weighs in at around 1.7GB. The owner of KingsIsle (who is also our CEO), Elie Akilian, told us that he did not want players to have to wait to play the game… at all(!) At first I argued (in fact I think I argued for years), but the team and I listened and tried to look at it from his perspective, the same perspective as the player. The player doesn’t want to think about installs and lengthy registration and helping us collect demographic data. They just want to play the game. So we continued to find ways to compress the data, remove duplicate assets, stream assets only as required while the player is entertained with another part of the game. We streamlined registration, getting them past the boring questions and into the exciting part - character creation. Every time we found a way to speed up entry into the game, I was sure it was the last technical rabbit we would pull out of the hat, and every time we go back and devote effort to it again we seem to somehow find even more optimizations. This kind of pushing is not scope creep, it is the opposite. This is the ultimate lesson in focus and polish. It reminds you to forget what you think you know, think about the player experience, and find new ways to achieve even greater results.

In conclusion for this installment, I would like to pull all these elements back into one, by explaining a concept I like to call “Resonance.” Vision, Focus, Quality, Expectations…all of these combine to produce a culture for your project that is hard to put into words. If you’ve worked on a couple of teams, you probably know instinctively what I’m talking about. Some teams just get it, while other teams struggle to gain momentum. It’s not about the skills and smarts of the individual team members. It’s finding a way to balance these factors, walking the tight-rope of innovation and achievement vs. quality and polish, sticking to your guns and knowing when to hold true to your Vision and when to say, “That’s not core. We’ll come back to it later.” As I mentioned earlier, it’s a sense on the behalf of every person who works on (and later plays) your title that the game knows what it is, and (equally importantly) knows what it is not. It requires that the vision is crystal clear, the team is focused on quality, and yet willing to constantly push the envelope in ways that will make a difference to the players.

In the next installment I will begin discussing a topic that was a constant hurdle for Shadowbane, but a competitive advantage for Wizard101: Technology.

Tags: Focus, Polish, Quality, Vision, Wizard 101