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Vision and Focus-Wizard 101

Nov 17, 2009 Articles Recommend|340views

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

Compares Shadowbane and Wizard 101-their current project.

Nov 5, 2009 Articles Recommend|939views

From Shadowbane to Wizard101 - the lessons I’ve learned developing two MMOs and spending nearly a decade in the online game space. It may seem strange to compare two projects with such different visions and audiences, but as the co-creator of both MMOs, I’ve found that many of the lessons I learned were the same for both projects. I’m currently the Senior Director of Software Engineering at KingsIsle Entertainment, the independent developer behind the popular family MMO Wizard101. However, my role has never been confined to technology alone and I’ve been integrally involved in the design, story-telling, and production of the games. So, I’d like to discuss some of the more interesting and, hopefully, helpful lessons I’ve gleaned by comparing these two projects in their entirety. As I reflect on my experiences, I will delve into various stories and lessons learned from both Shadowbane and Wizard101. Some of the items I will cover include: Vision and Focus, Critical Technology Decisions (scalability, tools, middleware, etc), Limited Expectations, Marketing, Quality and Polish, Crunch, Funding, and more. This first installment will serve to set the stage, providing some background on both projects.

In 1999 J Todd Coleman and I followed a long time dream and started Wolfpack Studios. We had a vision for a game that was, quite frankly, insanely ambitious and we had nearly zero experience making games - apart from running MUDs together in college. The idea was to build what could be best described as a dynamic world, feudal simulation; with player formed guilds, sub-guilds pledging fealty to parent guilds, player constructed cities, player run shops, player vs. player combat, city vs. city combat, and even empire vs. empire combat. The game had non-humanoid player characters, like Centaurs, flying characters, and a class system that had millions of class/subclass combinations. I’ve mentioned to people before that starting out in the game industry with a project of this scope would be somewhat like deciding to make movies and starting with something like Titanic. I still to this day find it amazing that as an indy studio, with very little experience, Wolfpack managed to launch Shadowbane, especially given the scope of the game. We went through no less than seven publishers and had a shoestring budget for an MMO. The project was a trial by fire and taught us many valuable lessons that we carried forward to Wizard101.

In the following installments we’ll dive into the key lessons learned from both projects, in many cases similar and in some cases very different. Whether you’re an MMO player, developer, or both, it should be an interesting journey through two extraordinarily different games.

Tags: Shadowbane, Wizard 101

Wizard 101 The different available schools in the magic-weilding

Jul 16, 2009 Articles Recommend|1,655views

Unlike most games, Wizard101 has no actual classes. Everyone is a wizard and there isn’t any getting around that. What the game does have is schools. What school you choose will effect which spells you can use and for the most part how you will play. There are seven schools of which to be a part, and you can not switch schools at any time. Although you will earn training points every so many levels that can be used to learn spells from other schools. Remember, any spells from your school are free while other schools require training points to learn.

School of Life - Theurgist

The Life School is focused on what the name suggests, life. Those taking part in this school will have the ability to keep others and themselves alive in combat. Their healing abilities limit them when it comes to attack power but they make up for that in accuracy. I’d suggest this to anyone that likes helping others and being in a group quite often. There is always someone that needs to be healed and this is a good way to do it. We also need to take into consideration that you get a unicorn. Who doesn’t want a healing unicorn? If that isn’t your thing you get to summon a rainbow sliding/gold throwing Leprechaun to attack your enemies. Life Spells get a damage boost from creatures of the Balance and Death schools.

School of Fire - Pyromancer

Fire is generally seen as the main destructive force in games these days but that’s not quite the case here. The Fire School teaches spells that will focus mainly on damage over time (or DoT). It is easy to see that the first few spells don’t pack a huge punch as you would hope they did but they really build up after a certain point. Taking on strong enemies relies on getting rid of their Health as fast as possible. The ability to stack your spells allows you to get rid of their health at record speeds with minimal health loss on your part. If you have always been a fan of doing damage over time or you just want to get in touch with your inner pyro, this is the School for you. Fire Spells get a Damage Boost against creatures of the Ice School.

School of Storm - Diviner

The Storm School is the power house of all of the Schools. Their spells focus on dealing large amounts of damage to get rid of the enemy quickly. With all that power, they have balancing weakness. The students of the Storm School have less accuracy with their spells as well as less base HP. With great power comes great weakness. If you plan on joining the School of Storm you better be ready to give it your all. One wrong spell could mean your death. This school is suggested for those that want to just obliterate the enemy and don’t mind taking harder hits than everyone else. Storm spells get a damage boost against creatures of the Myth School.

School of Ice - Thaumaturge

The Ice School is in general terms the opposite of the Storm School. The Ice school focuses on defense and keeping yourself alive more than taking out your enemies with high damage. Also unlike the Storm School they have the highest base HP, which makes them quite difficult to take down in a short amount of time. This school is great for those that don’t mind being the “tank” and in the process sacrificing a little bit of damage to do just that. Their spells also include a fairly interesting variety including an evil snowman. Ice spells get a damage boost against creatures of the Fire School.

School of Balance - Sorcerer

The Balance School is for those that like group play above solo play. This is due to the Balance School teaching students spells related to group play; like buffs. While you aren’t quite required to play in a group if you are a member of the Balance School it does focus on that aspect. Having a little bit of everything allows you to be able to attack, heal, and buff yourself. It’s the entire concept of having a slight edge over everyone else but at the same time being a tad behind. You should also note the Balance School has no actual building in Ravenwood although you can find the teacher placed near the entrance of it. Balance Spells have no damage boost toward any other school.

School of Death - Necromancer

The Death School teaches the students to “steal and support themselves”. They accomplish that through some of their spells having the ability to not only attack their target but have some of that damage be changed into health and given back to the caster. This allows them to heal themselves slightly during combat without having to give up a turn to heal. To counteract this, their spells aren’t quite the best in damage, but that’s where the buffs come in. This is great for those that just want to be able to do most of the combat alone and don’t want to worry about needing or giving support to others. To say that simpler terms: Death School is the school focused on allowing you to play alone. Deaths spells get a damage boost against creatures of the Balance and Life Schools.

School of Myth - Conjurer

The Myth School is exactly what the name suggests, Myth. The schools main focus point is giving students the ability to summon minions that can aid you in combat. Your spells usually involve summoning a mythical creature to attack your enemies for you. Your later spells mostly revolve around getting rid of your enemies defenses and supporting your minions. In the most basic sense of this school it would be classified as the “pet” school. That said if you like having a helping hand to aid in combat this is the best school for you. The Myth School is also a close contender for the “Main Solo School” due to minions being just as good as having a second characters helping you in combat. Myth spells get a damage boost against creatures of the Storm School.

Tags: Wizard 101