| ESRB:Wizard101 Dev Journals: From Shadowbane to Wizard 101
KingsIsle Entertainment's Josef Hall writes this developer journal kicking off a series that compares Shadowbane, his last project and Wizard 101, his current project. While there are many differences between the two, there are also similarities.
By Guest Writer on November 05, 2009
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.
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On first blush Wizard101 is a dramatically different property than Shadowbane. Whereas Shadowbane was a Player vs Player game targeting hard-core gamers, the goal of Wizard101 was to build a cinematic, funny, easy to play wizard game that would cater to kids, and if done right to their parents as well. Over four years ago, the kids MMO market was fairly sparse, with some notable exceptions like Disney's Toontown, and Runescape (which had just launched). Yet as different as the projects were on the surface, key lessons from Shadowbane and underlying similarities between the two projects helped smooth development of Wizard101 and set it up for subsequent success. Wizard101 launched in September of 2008, after nearly three and one half years of development, and has been growing ever since. It's acquired over 5 million registered users, has received fantastic reviews, and according to MMORPG was the third best MMO (and top family MMO) since the launch of World of Warcraft.
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.
I'm disappointed the article ended so quickly - I was really enjoying it and looking forward to getting to the more detailed bits. Can't wait to see future entires.
Yes i am always interested in various devs thoughts on their game design.
Was the goal to be very simplistic,time sinks,longevity,difficulties,money problems,time lines ect ect.
My feeling on Wiz 101 is it had a lot of influence from Toon Town.The graphic/art looks are great no denying it.I give a lot of props to the artists, animators for wiz 101 enemies.The whole look and feel for Wiz 101 is perfect,witch makes me wonder,was this their brilliance or sort of "borrowed" from Toon Town.
Inside the game is where there is a big difference.The design seems to keep to the young audience but imo kind of defeats the design through a mistake.This is in the questing,sure it is simplistic go here go there ,kill this kill that.All easy to understand for kids,however most of the time they went for a time sink in the quests.
The game on release was not finished ,not even close,i think it was like half done.So were these decisions on questing time sinks on purpose to buy time,or why exactly did they think kids would enjoy walking miles to find that NPC,then on return,send them back again maybe 5x lol.?IMO the age group the quests were aiming at 4-12,would have a heck of a time walking through several zones and several maps to find that NPC or enemy.Also the way some of the boss were spawned was imo too complicated for the young kids,when going back to farm pets.
You see to an adult the redundancy of the quests and their design,was very obvious,however not to young kids,i am sure they would not have a clue what was going on in the design.However the object is not to fool the young kids it is to give them FUN quests,i think the game missed the boat on FUN quests.
The mini games idea is great,but i feel the choices were not great ,was the choices made by one person?Were they voted on?ect ect.A very addictive minigame ,that i think works is the one where you hide objects in a large picture.There is actually quite a few ideas if you look to POPCAP games.Were these decisions done solely on cost of the games,did they design these mini games themselves?
Very cool read. I still can't believe Wizard101 and Shadowbane were made by some of the same folks. It's nice to have some perspective on how those decisions came about.
Wow. Who knew that Shadowbane wand Wizard101 were being run by basically the same people.
`Wario
Yeah the article was kinda neat, I just wish it was longer and they threw in more information. I didn't realize back in the day that they were so small. They tried to make one hell of an agressive game in the beginning as he said. Least they are making a new hit now. But again as somebody said, I wish they went deeper into some of the things they learned and such is all.
Btw if anybody is interesting, there is a group of people trying to bring shadowbane back alive. They are in the middle of making a nice emulator for it. If anybody wants to check it out its here http://www.shadowbaneemulator.com/
Wow, had no idea the same dude who made Shadowbane also made Wizard 101. I loved Shadowbane, with a deep passion. It was my first MMO and I played it for about 2 years. There was just nothing else like Shadowbane and it was well ahead of it's time. Especially since the MMO market was really just starting back then and Shadowbane was loaded with great new and innovative ideas. Many of which are just now being implemented in other games and some I've still yet to of seen used in other MMO's, because most of the industry are too damn scarred to take risks for innovation.
Which is just sad to me, because so many MMO companies just keep putting the same basic stuff in their games, just keep copying WoW content. Even WoW keeps coping it's self for the most part. I'm glad to see games like Guild Wars 2, SW: TOR, and SUN online coming along finally that are just loaded with cool and innovative classes, content and game play. There is hope that WoW clones might finally die out some day.
It's those types of games that make me miss Shadowbane even more as well. The game was just awesome. It had the most free will to make up your own character's story lines then I have ever seen in any MMO since then. You really could be whatever you wanted on a mid evil fantasy level in Shadowbane. I made so many fun and dieverce characters that it was insane. More so then any other MMO since then. I Played on the War server and there was this huge empire called Heads Head Legion. They were trying to take over the land and forcing everyone to join them or die. Meaning they would smash your city if you didn't fly under their banner. ;P It was very cool and gave a great feeling of being apart of the dark ages. So there was this big uprising led by another guild called Blood & Iron and a hand full of other guilds who were brave enough to challenge the evil empire in open war. It was huge and epic, unlike anything before or since then for me in gaming. And this game also had the best and funnest PvP strategic warfare ever. True open ended castle sieging, it was beautiful.
Maybe some day another game as amazing as it was will come along, as a true all out sand box MMO. But in this crazy market, full of WoW clones and lack of risk takers around, unless they have a few million to throw into a game and even then most of the time the company is too scarred to make a game almost 100% driven by the players, who really knows. Guess I'll just have to cross my fingers. ;)
Nevermind I was confused