From Shadowbane to Child’s Play: KingsIsle’s Todd Coleman on Wizard101

By Steven Crews | April 20, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: KingsIsle, Wizard101

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Steve sits down with Todd Coleman of KingsIsle Entertainment to discuss their free-to-play kid-centric MMO, Wizard 101. Topics discussed include the game’s background, inspirations, and plans for the future.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do at KingsIsle.

Todd Coleman: My name is J. Todd Coleman, and I’m the Director of Wizard101 at KingsIsle Entertainment.

That means I basically own the creative vision, the schedule, and the move forward plan of Wizard101.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s talk about that creative vision, first. When and how did you first come up with the concept for Wizard101?

And then how did you go from concept, to prototype, to what we’re looking at now?

Todd Coleman: The original idea was mine. I kind of scribbled on a note pad a bunch of ideas for characters-for example I had an evil snowman. The reason is I can’t draw at all, but I can draw three circles, one on top of each other. [laughing] Then there were also things like a ninja pig and a cyclops, things like that, and I built a card game around them.

Then me and Josef Hall, who is our Technology Director, would sit and play the game and come up with new ideas, and that’s basically where the concept came from.

Myself and the other leads on this project came out of Shadowbane, and we took some time off and decided we wanted to take a look at the market and see what nobody else was doing.

There are a lot of people now coming out with the same kind of vision that we had back in those days, PvP games. When we started Shadowbane they were unheard of, but now there are tons of them, many people are trying to get in on that.

So we backed up and said, “Okay, what do we want to go after now? What is nobody else doing?” And we noticed that there were some MMOs that were being done for very young kids, like Club Penguin and Toontown and Webkinz, and they were cool games.

And then you had on the other side of the coin you had Warhammer, and World of Warcraft, and Shadowbane and games that really weren’t appropriate for kids.

We noticed there was really nothing in between. If I had a kid who was too old for Toontown but I wasn’t ready to throw him into Barrens chat, there really weren’t any good options.

So we went out to try and figure out, what did we think would be cool, or what do we think would be an interesting game? What would be suitable for that age group that we would also enjoy working on? We’d actually find fun?

And so it kind of ended up being a little bit of a mash up of Harry Potter, Yugioh, and the older Final Fantasy games all mashed together.

The idea of let’s take a collectable card game at its base, let’s build all the social structure of an MMO, and the overall immersive world aspect of an MMO, and then let’s tie that to a very approachable fantasy concept like a wizard school.

Obviously Harry Potter was a big influence, also Terry Pratchett, the Dragonlance series with their wizards, the idea of a wizard school was very appealing to us.

The MMO Gamer: Wizard101 is obviously a very big departure from Shadowbane. How did you manage to shift gears like that, from hardcore ganking PvP to cutesy wizard school in the 9 to 13 demographic?

Todd Coleman: Well, a big chunk of it was that we just wanted to do something else.

We had been living and breathing Shadowbane for 80 hours a week for five years straight, and we were burned out. By the end of it, we wanted to go find something that was more casual, something we could have fun with and if we wanted to invent a Samurai cow and call him Sam-moorai, that was okay. Nobody was going to care.

And so from that standpoint it was actually quite freeing to go from something where we took the IP so seriously, and we took the gameplay and the balance of the game so unbelievably seriously, to something that was just kind of light and fun that we didn’t have to try and kill ourselves with.

Also, Shadowbane was our first effort at doing a game at all, quite frankly, so we made a lot of mistakes, we tried to learn from those mistakes, so this was a chance for us to go back with a nice clean slate and start over technologically, design-wise, vision-wise and come out and say, “Here’s our vision. Here’s our goal. Here are the resources we need to attack that goal and we’re going to do it right.”

And if you get in, the one thing that we universally get praised on now with this game, even people who are like, “Well it’s not for me,” they give us lots of praise for the amount of polish that we put into it.

So we really set our vision, and set our goal, and we were ravenous about trying to stick to it and really achieve it, and I think that’s the one thing I’m probably the most proud of is how well we lived up to that vision.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on to the gameplay side, your description of Pokémon meets Final Fantasy in the demo seemed very accurate.

Combat is entirely a card-oriented turn-based system, correct? There is no traditional MMO type hacking, slashing?

Todd Coleman: Nope. No hacking. No slashing. None of that.

The MMO Gamer: Have you ever thought about branching into that at some point in the future?

Todd Coleman: Not really. We may add other activities, we totally have it within our sights to do other things so that if you want to have fifteen minutes where you log in and you’re not interested in going and dueling with our card game, we are adding other activities for that. PvP was one of those.

Housing is really the first activity that is totally separate. I can go have a party in my house. I can decorate it. I can invite friends over. It’s just a different experience.

And what you will see over the course of the next year, I hope, is that we’ll continue adding other adjunct game experiences, other types of play that you can do that add to the overall experience of Wizard101.

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