The Development of an Online Wizard-Themed MMO Game + Win a Free MMO Account

James, from Wizard101, discusses their online wizard MMO.

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http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-wizard101-interview-podcast.mp3

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

James: My name is James Nance. I’m the Project Lead on Wizard101. I’m the Live Team Lead. I was Lead Designer during production.

Interviewer: What is Wizard101?

James: Wizard101 is a fantasy, wizard-based online game, massive multiplayer game. We sort of combine the elements of Pokemon card game style combat. We have a lot of flavors of the fantasy online Harry Potter and Arthurian legends and all kinds of historical background, Merlin the wizard and all that.

We basically are targeting the… It’s kind of 8 to 88 is our target market. Our main demographic was kids. We found since launch, we’re a year out now, we found that we have a huge broad appeal. We’ve got a bunch of adults who are playing the game. That was pretty cool.

We marketed mainly toward kids. The game is aimed at kids, real casual style, approachable graphics and all that, but the goal was to hit families, right? So, we got a lot of people who play the game with their kids; never played a game before, but they want to be involved in what the kids are doing online. They want to check out what their kids are interacting with, and they get hooked. So, we end up with a lot of parents, too.

Interviewer: I noticed on your site you do have that specific targeting also for parents. Have you looked into family MMO mechanics, or are you looking at different game design mechanics in terms of how you get the parents to interact with the kids? Or are you taking the traditional route where the parents are playing and then the kids are kind of there, also, with them playing, also, where it’s just parents and kids at the same time.

James: As far as game playing goes, we didn’t go too far down that road. We’ve talked about introducing basically a guild equivalent mechanic at some point that would have some game play around family accounts. We do things that, like we are able to share dew drops between different characters in the same account because we kind of assume that brothers and sisters might be sharing the same account.

But most of that we concentrated on the account management level. We have a lot of parental controls in place. We have the ability to have kind of an umbrella account structure where we have a parental account, and then you have sub-accounts underneath it for family members. So, we really came at it from more of a parental management point of view rather than changing up the game play a lot because we know people have different schedules and things like that. But it’s something we want to grow toward.

Interviewer: OK. While you were developing this game, when did you get started and what were some of the challenges that you encountered as you guys were developing this?

James: It’s interesting. Kind of the core development team, myself, Todd Coleman, who is our Creative Director, and Josef Hall, who is our Development Director, Engineering Director, we’ve worked together a long time. Todd and I have been friends since high school. Josef, Todd and I have been friends since college.

This is our second MMO together, actually. We were the developers on Shadowbane which was a crazy, hard core PVP game. It was kind of a big jump to go to a casual kid’s game.

Before that, we had done commercial software. We did database tools and things like that. We sold our first company off, and we decided we want to make games. We all like games. We like games. We played MUDs back in the day. And so, we were like, what the hell. Let’s make a game, and it turned out to be really hard.

So we learned a lot of lessons on Shadowbane, and we came back around and sold this idea to our CEO. And basically, he loved the idea of doing a family oriented company. The vision there is to sort of be the Pixar of games, you know. We do high quality, family fun, entertainment, and we tie them all together. It’s approachable to the kids and the adults.

So, the three of us kind of got together. Todd and Josef came up with the idea. Josef at the time was a parent and said we really should aim this really into the kids market. There’s really not a lot out there other than, maybe, TuneTown was around back then.

Interviewer: Sure.

James: So, that’s where the core idea came from. And the development, there were a lot of risks involved. We knew kind of how to make a traditional MMO, but when you start doing things like putting in a turn-based card game and really cinematic final fantasy style combat, there’s a lot of risk.

And then, on top of that you’re aimed at kids so you’ve got to have a lot of concern about who the kid’s chatting with, what can they do, what can they not do. Are they able to give away their phone numbers and addresses and stuff online? So, we had to deal with all of those challenges.

It basically started with: let’s make a card game. And so, we did a paper prototype. We actually made physical cards. Todd sketched horrible art onto the little 5 x 9 cards, and we just played the game. We rolled dice. We had little pieces for help and things like that, and we just played the game until we iterated on it. If we didn’t like the damage something did, we’d pinpoint something out and we’d just erase it on the card and start over.

Once we got the paper game to where we liked it, Josef developed what we called a 2D prototype. It didn’t have any 3D capability. It was basically 2D art with a card game that you could play against other people. We connected with a server, and you could chat basic capabilities.

And then, once we iterated on that a few times, we had it in AI so you could fight against monsters and have teams, and it was really just a way to kind of nail down what the core game mechanic was. Once that was really, really fun we started fleshing out the rest of the game systems.

Interviewer: What language did you do the prototype in?

James: It was all C, C++.

Interviewer: Was there any other challenges when you were doing these prototypes? Were there any surprises? Did you have kids come and test it out, or how did that work?

James: We actually did a lot of focus testing early on in the process, everything from the hard style to the business model to the card game itself, and we got a lot of feedback from kids and from parents and families, single adults and all that. We really just kind of incorporated all that along the way. There was one point where we probably had just a dozen concept sketches of a kid with a pet because we really wanted to get the pet into it. And we just showed it to a ton of different people and let them vote on it basically, and that’s how we went with our art style.

Interviewer: You talked about business model. Can you talk about how you experimented with that, and what were some of the considerations you were doing? You may have heard of Webkinz at that time. I don’t know if, while you’re developing this, all these huge kids hits came out of the blue. How did that impact your development cycle and even your strategy?

James: Yeah, right, that’s totally true. When we started down this road, we were traditional online gamers which we were thinking subscription models is the way to go. It’s got that nicer, current revenue model and all that, but then you start getting Webkinz coming out. You get RoomScape coming out. You’ve got Club Penguin who got bought by Disney for an obscene amount of money so that really had to get our attention.

We sort of debated a little bit, whether to go with micro payments or go with subscriptions or whatever, and we basically decided to go with a hybrid approach. Really, nobody had done that at that point. The idea of doing sort of a premium service for subscription and doing value add for micro payment is where we started. We kind of came to that conclusion a little bit late in the dev cycle, and our micro payment solution kind of suffered for that, actually.

If you’re going to put micro payments in, you really need to think about how it’s going to impact the game. How are you going to present it to the user? How are they going to buy your money? How are they going to spend it? Do they have to go to a shop? From a balance perspective, are you going to sell power in game, or is it all cosmetic? There’s a lot of considerations there, and when you throw subscribers into the mix who rightfully have a sense of entitlement, they’re already paying for your game so you’ve got to be real careful how many other things you put in there for money that, maybe, they’re not getting for their subscription.

There’s a lot you have to consider, and like I said, we kind of came to that decision a little bit late. And so, some of the mechanisms we used to present those micro payments were a little bit clumsy. Now, here we are a year later. We’ve having to go back and really polish that whole process. We’re putting in a new interface to purchase crowns and the spin crowns in the game. And we’re offering new micro payment services. We have rental items and things like that that you can buy now.

Interviewer: Did you guys considering putting cards or other items in actual physical stores then?

James: Actually, we did and putting a physical card game out in some capacity has been a dream of ours since the beginning as sort of a natural extension. We’ve mocked up a couple different versions in-house. We have one actually in development, and we’re trying to figure out the best way and sort of best time to launch it. But everything we do supports the game, supports the brand, so anything we do is going to feed back into the game.

I think WOW has done a really good job with their card game, providing scratch-offs. We look at the way Sony came up with their card games. It was all virtual, and they’ve done a really compelling job in their games and sort of made that part of their core focus as all their games will have a card game. We really like some of the things they’ve done, and we will be coming out with a card game at some point.

Interviewer: While you were developing all this, you know, we mentioned Club Penguin. We mentioned Webkinz, and then they’re this onslaught of 200 or 300 virtual worlds for kids that are coming out. How do you guys stay focused? What does that do in terms of motivating you guys to either change technology or get your game out on a different time cycle? Did that have any impact?

James: Well, there were a couple of things there. As far as the time cycle goes, we were, I don’t know what you call it, lucky or smart. Todd and Josef had a vision for Shadowbane, and they had a vision for this game which was really forward looking, just to jump back in time a little bit. When we started developing Shadowbane, EQ wasn’t made then.

The only game that was out at that time was UO, and we all played UO when it came out. We had friends on the dev team. I worked at Origin back in the day, so I knew a lot of people on the team. We talked a lot, and I was one of the dread lords and these horrible PVP griefers when it first came out.

By the time we started developing Shadowbane, they had really turned the corner in terms of wanting to push that kind of behavior out of their game. And so, there was a huge kind of hearkening back to: man, we really liked PVP. We really liked dread lords. We really liked that kind of thing. So, Todd, Josef and I really saw, man, there’s a market here for people who want to go PVP and go do this kind of thing.

Then, EQ came out and they were real PVP focused. There’s no PVP and we thought, man, there’s a real market here. Well, they did the same thing with Wizard. There was one kid’s game out there of any consequence. We didn’t know at the time whether these browser-based games were going to do anything or whether they were going to catch on, and their tech level made for really rapid development. At the same time, they’re not quite as solid. It’s not quite a full 3D game. There’s not all the depth there. There’s not all the story line there. So, for them to see that market…

Now, there’s a ton of people getting in the kids market. You’ve got Free Realms. Disney’s put out two more games. Marvel’s got a hero game. Everybody’s getting in the kids market. But four years ago, five years ago nobody was looking at that, so they really saw an opportunity there.

But we did make the decision early on; we don’t want to be a browser game. We want to be a real game, real 3D environment, tell a real story with lots of pretty graphics, and that caused a whole host of problems because you pretty much have to have a download at that point.

Our CEO, Elie Akilian, felt really strongly about going with digital distribution, and he really pushed on us the whole time. His bit from day one was we’re going to do a big commercial blast when we come out, and the kids need to see the commercial, go start the game, and by the time their show starts back up, by the time Sponge Bob or whatever comes back on they’re already into the game. Our goal was to have a three to five minute window when we could get through registration, download the game and start that process of getting them involved. That’s pretty tough for a 3D game.

Interviewer: So, once you released, how did you go about marketing? Did you then do a commercial on Nickelodeon? Do you have any suggestions for other indie game developers who want to promote their own game because you guys are growing and there’s a lot of kids MMOs that just got released and nothing happened.

James: You know, there’s not an easy answer. When we started WolfPack and did Shadowbane, we put our own money in that company, and we really bootstrapped that thing up. We got a little tiny office and we hired people, and we were making payroll on our credit cards and all that. And we really pushed the viral market aspect. It was easier to do back then because there were a lot more indie new sites. There were a lot more hard core fan sites out there than there are now. A lot of them have been pulled in an umbrella of bigger media groups.

Honestly, we’ve been really, really lucky with this one because we have the freedom of being an indie studio, but our owner, Elie Akilian, is really dedicated. He really wants to make this work and has a huge vision for where the company is going to go. And so, he has been really generous with the amount of capital he is willing to commit to this. He knew from day one that he wanted a big marketing initiative, and so we did a quiet launch back in September, and we saw where things went.

We had launched during school; school just started back up. We saw the game patterns and saw what the kids were doing and started doing a little bit of marketing. And by the beginning of that next year, man, we really started the TV blasts, and I’m sure at this point we’ve spent at least as much or more on marketing than we did making the game. The sad fact is most indie developers can’t afford to do that. You depend on either word of mouth, or you’ve got to go to a publisher to put up marketing money. It’s tough.

Interviewer: What about viral marketing techniques now? I’m sure that there’s some equivalent of the viral marketing techniques that you used before but just a different type of format or a different type of thing. Maybe, it’s Facebook. Maybe, it’s YouTube or something else.

James: You know, the social networking sites are a really good way to go. There’s no substitute for going out and slapping palms and meeting people and talking about the game and writing blogs and getting people jazzed about it. But, yeah, Twitter, you’ve got Twitter now you can talk about the game. People do blogs and have blogs people read. You’ve got Facebook, and you can do everything from blast out to everybody’s friends about the game to: it’s not even too hard to write a little Facebook app or a Facebook game that ties back in to it.

Interviewer: I think there’s actually a Facebook game called School of Magic that has quite a few users, you know, along the same theme.

James: Yeah, we’ve looked at them. We’ve talked about developing around Facebook at some point, so we really want to push down the viral avenue, too. But, really, you just have to meet people. Get your name out there. Go to the shows but, really, get people to play your game. If you can make a quality product, it will sell itself.

Interviewer: What then are the current challenges you guys are facing in terms of your game and what’s next?

James: Well, the game is doing really, really well so that is the question: what’s next?

Interviewer: Congratulations.

James: Thanks. Of course, we’re looking at all the metrics and the numbers and want to tweak everything we’ve done so far. Just like any game that’s live, you want to make sure that you can brew the game, balance the game, expand the game without screwing up what you’ve already done which can be tricky because if 80 percent of your players like what you’re doing and you change it for the 10 percent, you shoot yourself in the foot.

Interviewer: In the future, are you going to have subscriptions and micro transactions coexist? It does seem like… I don’t know how it’s set up, but it seems somewhat paradoxical and it could alienate one audience or the other.

James: It actually coexists now, the way that we have access to all of our content through micro payments. We set up an access pass system where it’s a buffet of content. They play along, and they hit a point where they are ready to go to the next chapter in the story. And they can just purchase that through the micro payment thing.

It’s worked out really pretty well. Of course, we would love for everybody to be a subscriber and a micro payment and make use of everything we offer, but the real goal between offering subscriptions and micro payments was driven by that Webkinz and Club Penguin audience because we wanted to get the old school MMO player who’s used to playing subscriptions and get that recurring revenue. We knew that the market was moving to micro payments, so we figured, let them pick which way they want to pay.

Interviewer: You guys mentioned the challenges of having live chat with kids. Do you guys then offer chat, or have you removed that from the game? Does it matter?

James: No, we actually have three different levels of chat in the game, and being an indie company it’s been a challenge because we’ve looked at the way other people have done this. And the main solution that they’ve come up with is to throw people at it. We can’t really afford to do that.

If you go look at Club Penguin or one of those big companies, they just moderate the hell out of their chat. They have people online all the time, and if you say something inappropriate, there’s a GM there ready to snatch you up and push your bubble to kind of protect the kids.

And then, there’s a lot of other sites out there that just pay lip service to being kid safe. They talk about it, but you can go in there and do whatever you want, and that’s kind of… For parents, it’s a little disturbing. I’m a parent now, too, so it’s a little scary.

We have three levels of chat in Wizard. We have a menu chat system similar to what TuneTown had. We’re at the basic level. Kids who are 13 and under can select phrases, pre-existing phrases from a menu and talk that way.

We have what we call filtered chat which is a really unique system. I don’t think anybody else does this. We have a dictionary of safe words that we put in which we call a white list, and then we have what we call the black list, and that’s inappropriate combinations of those white list words. This is something that is available to kids over 13.

So, they can talk all they want about the game. Common phrases are in there. They can say, hey, let’s go the unicorn way and kill ghosts or whatever. And they can say words like, you know, hey, check out my robe or whatever. I got a new wand, but they can’t say: look under my robe, things like that. Phrases that are inappropriate are blacked out. Words that we like are good.

And then for adults, this is all through parental control, we have unfiltered chat which basically just goes through a profanity filter. So, for people over 18 or for parents who want to set it down we have open chat.

Interviewer: Do you think chat is even necessary? You now see these social games where it’s more about interacting with friends in asynchronous manner. Do you feel that chat adds a lot to your game, or is it even needed for an indie game developer to even think about chat and having to moderate it? Maybe, it’s not even necessary in the first place. What are your thoughts?

James: You know, it’s kind of tough. I can potentially see a model where you could do open chat with a small group of friends, and maybe that would work. But I play a lot of games. I play single player games, MMO games. Whenever I go back and play a really good RPG and it’s not an online game, I really feel the lack of that.

I don’t necessarily go out of my way to socialize on online games, but I like seeing people running around. I like knowing that there’s tens of thousands of other people out there chatting and telling stories and talking about stuff. And I like the idea of being able to show off my achievements to other people. So, I think that community is one of the things that makes these games so compelling and not to say there’s not some room to experiment there, but you really need to be careful not to lose that. I think that’s part of the magic.

Interviewer: You talked about micro transactions. You talked about subscriptions. Can you talk about some of the other game design mechanics that you’ve added to either enhance the community, enhance the game play and engagement?

James: Well, we were really on a tight schedule and a small team when we launched the game. We wanted to get this game out in three, three and a half years, and we wanted to keep our team size really, really small.

When I look at some of this big triple A MMO guys out there who have 200 people on their team, I’m like, wow, that’s incredible. We try to keep a team of 30 to 50 people, something small and manageable. We ramped up a little bit through some QA, but what that meant was the only way to hit the day with that many people was you got a scope.

You got to really cut back, so any thing, any system that we deemed not critical to the core game play, we put off. We didn’t launch with an auction house. We didn’t launch with crafting. We didn’t launch with mouse. We didn’t launch with housing. There were a lot of really core systems because we felt like we could deliver the vision of the game without that, and it was kind of critical to get out.

So, what we’ve done since is to go back and every three or four months we add one of those major systems back in. One of the recent milestones that I think we put out back in May was we upgraded a lot of our chat capabilities. We put in new chat windows. We put in the ability to have grouping and chat channels, and then one of the things that we’ll try and add next year is full-on guilds and guild banks and guild support and really build on that community. We’re adding these features in as we go. That’s, I think, a good way to do it, especially for an indie company.

Interviewer: Do you have weekly content updates or is it every three or four months? How do you keep people wanting to come back? I’ve seen other MMOs actually send out stuff, maybe, every three days or every six days, seven days; just new content, things that you can buy for a home or something else like that.

James: Yeah, it really varies. Some people are better at it than others. There are some games, like you said, that update once a month or every couple of weeks, and then, look at Blizzard who updates every year. So, we’re somewhere in between. We try and put out a major revision, right now, every three or four months, and that includes content and new systems. But we’re still dealing with a relatively small team, and so we have to do a mix of balance and web fixing and new features.

And then the other interesting thing that sort of differentiates us is we’re still in our heart a kid’s game, and we’re a casual game. And that means unlike other games… I just was playing Champions, and they had people hit max level in the pre-start. That’s crazy. They consume their content instantly. These are hard core guys, and they get in and they play 20-30-40 hours a week, whatever, super hard core.

We’re not like that. We’ve been out a year now, and we’re just watching where the majority of our players are in terms of consuming our content. They’re maybe halfway through what our stuff is.

Interviewer: And kids actually like repeat stuff over and over again.

James: Plus you look at the play cycles. Like a typical MMO, you’ll find your peak hours are starting, basically, when work lets out on the west coast, and they extend toward late night on the east coast. During the summer, at least, our peak starts about nine in the morning and stays until about nine at night. There is no spike there. It’s relatively flat, and then we see that change back to more traditional during school because when kids get off school they come play.

Everything from average player session, number of times players get in per day, the time they spend consuming their content. These are things we’ve had to re-examine over time, and they affect your content strategy. So, I could push really, really hard and put out a bunch of in-game content, but that would really be 5 or10 percent of our user base. They’re the vocal 5 or 10 percent, and we have to help out those guys out eventually.

That’s why, for example, our first major content update was a new world called Grizzleheim, and we made it span all the levels. It started early on, and you would go do a bunch of adventures and then you would leave and come back and leave and come back and kind of spanned the whole cycle of the game to hit as many of our users as possible because that bubble… It’s what we call the bubble where the users are is still rising up because it exhausted our content.

Interviewer: In terms of content releases that you’ve had, what have been the most successful? What do players respond to? Is it pets, what?

James: Players love the pets, I got to say. They are really, really popular, and that’s why our major feature we have coming out in October is going to be mouse, and I think that’s going to hit right in that same “got to catch them all, that’s a cool mouse” sort of thing.

And we have an advanced pet system we’re working on that really fleshes out what all pets can do and advancing and developing your pets. That, of course, has been a huge seller. Anything cosmetic is going to sell. Pets in particular have a special place.

Interviewer: While you were developing your MMO, did you run into any scaling issues or any other development challenges?

James: Probably the biggest one that we had, which is really a good cautionary tale, is we knew that we wanted to hit the casual market, and there weren’t that many real 3D games out that had done that. So, we sort of said, what do kids play on? Well, they’re going to play on mom and dad or older brother’s hand-me-down PC.

So, we went and did a bunch of research early on, on what min specs were out there, and what kind of PCs were out there. And then, we got all of the research back and thought, OK, this is a good starting place. But then we realized, and this was a huge revelation on the part of Josef, our director of engineering, all of this research was based on feedback from gamers. And gamers typically have much more powerful, better rigs, even hand-me-down rigs, than your average guy is going to.

So, we took what our research showed and then we stepped that back quite a bit so that we can run the game on integrated chip sets on video cards. We can run the game on a G-Force 2. We lose some features, like we don’t have advanced Pixel shooters and things like that but, man, you can’t come out with a casual MMO that’s got leading edge system requirements and expecting to play it. And we’ve really had huge feed back on that.

It affected a lot of our development because we had to do stuff, like you hit a driver problem during development. A normal developer of a normal MMO would just say, screw it. The user has to go upgrade their drivers. We had to program around that because we had to assume these users were never going to upgrade their drivers. They were never going to install their service packs.

They were going to be back on Win2K or ME or whatever, and that continues to be a development issue, everything from mince back to making sure our download packages remain really tiny even though we’re growing the content to – I think the latest one is – we’ve gone through to make sure we run through all the new generation of Net Books because those are coming. That’ll be 300 bucks for a PC. Your game better run on that if you want to be casual because that’s what all the casuals are going to buy.

Interviewer: So what suggestions then do you have for other indie game developers who want to develop their own MMO?

James: You know, really it’s not just indie developers. Come up with your idea. Figure out what your core game play is going to be. Iterate on it until it’s fun, until you’re happy with it and then build the rest of it. And just keep your vision true to that because if you try and do everything, if you try and go off in the weeds, if you worry too much about all these other systems or what you’re providing, you’re never going to get there.

The best thing is keep your game simple. Keep it fun, and it’ll do fine.

Interviewer: What are the top five learning lessons that you’ve had throughout this whole MMO experience then, or surprises?

James: Oh man, I think the scoping one is huge. You’ve got to keep everything scoped. You’ve got to get your design nailed down. Don’t go outside of it. Remember who your audience is, back at the casual market, mince back, all that stuff.

The number one lesson on MMOs is no matter big or small, content is king. You’ve got to make sure you launch Windows content. We kind of struggled with that.

Interviewer: Do you guys have inflation issues with your game, or is that even relevant?

James: How do you mean?

Interviewer: By inflation of the economy, people can earn a lot of gold or I don’t even know if that’s an issue.

James: Actually, it’s not an issue in the game only because we’ve made a real point not to make it one. We don’t have real trading of items in the game. We have a very safe auction house mechanism, things like that. So, I’ve done everything possible to keep gold sellers and power gamers and all that stuff or level sellers and those guys out of the game.

It’s really been a struggle because people want those features, but it’s pretty bad when you have that kind of inflation going on.

Interviewer: Great. Where can people find out more about the game and start playing it?

James: Wizard101.com is the best place to start. You can get all the information there. You can download the game. That’s the best place to go.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.