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

The MMO Gamer: It’s a very unique system in terms of the MMO genre, how people who have played more traditional MMOs are reacting to it?

Do they find it’s a refreshing change of pace? Or-I almost hesitate to say this-does the card-based combat get a bit repetitive after a while?

Todd Coleman: To some degree it does. We tried to put in enough that that wouldn’t happen and then, as you look at the PvP system, and then there are, what, I think we just saw 400 or something like that, pages of PVP matches going on.

That is our combat system at its heart, I mean, you’ve stripped away the quest, you’ve stripped away any context, you’re just throwing people into combat. And yet, they find it fun enough that they’re doing it over and over and over constantly.

So, is there an element of repetitiveness? There is. Any MMO, in fact, any game, there’s going to be a point where repetitiveness eventually becomes a problem.

When you’re trying to design a game that has 600 hours of gameplay, you have to be constantly aware of that as a designer and trying to come up with other activities, trying to find ways to spice it up and keep it as fresh as possible.

We have found though that there’s a large percentage of people who come in and do give the game credit-even if it’s not for them, they give the game credit for taking design risks and not just going with the standard WoW model of combat.

That’s something that me and the other guys on my team really pride ourselves on. With Shadowbane, a lot of people had good to say about it; a lot of people had bad to say about it. But everybody at least recognized that we were taking a different swing at the market. We were not there to just make a me-too product.

The MMO Gamer: How did you begin approaching the design for a younger demographic?

We were obviously both kids at one time, but that was a very long time ago. How did you begin to gauge what kids would be interested in, in an MMO?

How did you begin to define that feature set, and when you had the working prototype going, did you have to go back and change anything major once some actual kids got their hands on it?

Todd Coleman: We did. We had to make some changes, but the core revision is the same one that we came up with when were – back in the very beginning of the project, that the core vision hasn’t really changed.

We did a lot of design iteration. We started with little notepad cards that I mentioned and then we actually built a table map like you see for other collectible card games, where you have to set your cards in certain places.

We had some rules back then that we tried, and then once we got that kind of baked to a point that we liked it, we created a 2D prototype that was, as it turns out, it was all PvP because we didn’t have AI written out at the time.

We played against each other online and we got the feeling for that while the core tech was being built. And then, eventually, once we felt like that was pretty good, we migrated it over and we started working on getting an alpha version out.

So, it was very iterative. Shifting gears wasn’t actually that hard, I don’t think. I mean, I believe that game development is an art, not a science, and good artist, like the guys I work with, are adaptable to different styles.

I think all of us have a little bit of that young-at-heart thing. We can remember when we were younger; we were playing Shining Force all night and stuff like that. We can remember watching The Dark Crystal with our eyes wide open when we were kids.

And so all of that stuff kind of permeates and then becomes part of your sensibilities. Later, you’ll find weird things that bubble up and you can’t even remember where they came from.

It’s a tough question, I don’t know exactly. How hard it was to shift gears? I don’t know. It was never a conscious decision like, “Now, I have to concentrate on kid things.” It was more of a “Hey, this seems really interesting and fun; let’s go work on this for a while.” And it just kind of took on a life of its own.

The MMO Gamer: On a somewhat more delicate subject, if I may play devil’s advocate just for a moment, this is a question I pose to all the developers of children’s MMOs I speak to, whether it’s Club Penguin, or Free Realms, etc.:

Is it appropriate to be involving young children in what is arguably-I’m sure we could both vouch for this-a very addictive genre?

Todd Coleman: Well, that’s actually a problem not just for kids, but for adults, right? I do think though to your point that as game designers, we have a responsibility to make the games good and make them immersive and fun, but also to not make them-those are design decisions.

You can go out of your way to say, “I’m going to make this adventure take eight hours for a team of 30 people,” or you can say, “I’m going to design this to be devoured or consumed in 15 to 20 minute increment.”

We absolutely went out of our way to try and build a game that was going to take into account that what parents would want their kids doing online. We had to do the same thing with Chat, our chat system.

If you’re under 13, you’re limited to pre-packaged phrases only. Specifically you can say things like, “Hello, how are you?” but you can’t just openly chat with anybody else in the game. Even for those that are over, that are 13 and over, we went to a much further level of filtering than you see typically out of these games.

Usually people will put in a profanity filter which is just a database of bad words and if you type one it doesn’t let you say it. We went the opposite approach. We built a database of 8,000 good words and if it’s not in that database, you can’t say it. And then even of those good words, certain phrases have been blocked.

So you can say the word “pants” all day long, but if you try and use the phrase “in my pants,” we don’t let you say it because there’s no good reason you should be talking about something being in your pants in our game.

So, it is definitely a higher bar to set as a designer. You want to keep that in mind at all times and the leads that we have on the product, all of us are parents. My son is only one, so he probably won’t be jumping into Wizard any time soon, but it’s important for us to make environments and put safety first to make sure that we would feel comfortable with our kids being online.

I think as long as you have people that are doing that, then you get a product that is pretty safe. That said, parents need to be the ultimate arbiter. It doesn’t take the responsibility away from the parent to decide what is appropriate for their child on television or in movies or online, certainly online.

The MMO Gamer: To your point about your one-year-old son, don’t be so sure about that. You never know. PBS might be coming out with Sesame Street online before too long.

Todd Coleman: That’s true! [laughing]

Continued on next page…