So you love playing MMOs and roleplaying adventures for your online character, but did you ever wish that there was more to the story? Writing your own fan fiction can be a way to invent new adventures with your game character with no restrictions or limits to your imagination. Once you’ve decided to venture into the world of game fan fiction, there are some techniques you can employ to make your stories stand out and engage your readers.
Help Us Picture Your Character
One advantage of writing fan fiction is that the environment is already created. For example, if you’re writing about Wizard101 or Pirate101 then you’re automatically writing about the Spiral – a land where your readers will be familiar with. What we’re not familiar with however, is your character. What do they look like? What are their dreams? Who is their enemy? Take a look at the two paragraphs below to see what I mean:
I am Lauren SparkleWeaver, a myth Wizard questing day by day in Wizard City. One day I aim to rid the Spiral of Malistaire’s evil.
I blew a strand of long blonde hair out of my eyes, and tightened my grasp on the worn wooden handle of my magic Myth staff. “I am Lauren Sparkleweaver,” I hissed as I cut my eyes across the pond in Wizard City, “and one day I’m going to rid the Spiral of Malistaire’s evil.”
With any kind of writing, the big rule is show, don’t tell. In your fan fiction, show us your character by lots of description!
Create a Dynamic Intro
The best writing grabs the reader’s attention from the very beginning! Open your fan fiction story with compelling content like beautiful description, an interesting problem that needs solving, or fun dialogue. Check out samples from these two stories from KingsIsle players for an example of how to nicely introduce a fan fiction story.
The duel finally ended with a solid touch to the left shoulder. “Good! Very good.” Morgan Lafitte stood back, regarding her student with a pleased eye. Anne Radcliffe beamed at the praise, only somewhat tempered by the knowledge that she was sweaty and winded from the bout, while Morgan was not even breathing hard. Still, she had managed to get past her teacher’s formidable guard, not an easy feat at all.
By Virtuous Anne Radcliffe, a Pirate101 Player (read the entire story)
Something totally unexpected happened to me today. This was stranger than anything I’d ever witnessed before. It was even more surprising then the time that John couldn’t move anymore because I’d glared at him, or the time that the snowman came to life because I’d been thinking about Frosty. It was even stranger then the day that the public swimming pool turned into an ice skating rink because I had wished for it. No, it was even more astonishing than all those things combined. Well, to start, have you ever heard of Ravenwood School? ….. No? Well then, maybe I should start from the beginning.
By Sierra Winterbreeze, a Wizard101 Player (read the entire story)
Keep Your Dialogue Clear and Interesting
- When a new person speaks, you need to start a new paragraph.
- Even if they only say “Ok!” you still need to create a new paragraph every time a different person speaks.
- Break up long strands of dialogue with description
- Use verbs instead of “he said”
- He replied
- He laughed
- He screamed
- He sneered
Divide Your Story Into Appropriate Sections
It is a trend in a lot of fan fiction to create stories with multiple parts or chapters, and in a lot of ways that can be the right thing to do. It leaves your reader wanting more, breaks up the story into readable chunks, and gives the story an epic feel. What you don’t want to do though, is have each part/chapter be extremely short. Make sure your story has enough “meat” in each segment to introduce/remind your readers of the conflict, describe your character(s) and develop the plot.
Have a Friend Review Your Work
Nobody can create beautiful art all by themselves! Having a friend or family member read your story before publishing is a great way to get someone else’s opinion on your work as well as have a second pair of eyes look for spelling and grammatical errors. Spell check helps too!
Have Fun With It!
Even though writing good fan fiction can be a difficult challenge, it’s also a lot of fun! The game worlds that we have created are now in your control, and you can do whatever you want with them. Maybe Professor Greyrose is taking everyone on a field trip to Grizzleheim, or your Pirate wants to build their very own Buffaloon stable in Cool Ranch! Wherever your imagination may take the story, your enjoyment at writing will shine through to your readers.
When you have a finished piece of game fan fiction, you can always submit it to the Wizard101 fan fiction or Pirate101 game fan fiction sections! We publish a variety of stories per month. Happy writing players!
Want to read some amazing fan fiction? Check out some of our favorites!
- The Adventures of John Drake by Heather LegendHunter
- The Most Powerful Spells of All by Aliah LotusPetal
- The Chosen Three by Sabrina Icebane
- A Survivor’s Word by D.S. Devereaux
- Seekers of the Spiral by Witty Nathan Bowman
- The Ninja Pig & Her Foster Child by Virtuous Anne Radcliffe
Lauren Mauldin
Marketing Website Producer
Today Art Lead Melissa Preston gives us a walk-through of what it’s like to walk in her shoes! See some of the amazing work she does with Pirate101 to give you the characters and environments you know and love in the game.
Every morning after I get myself organized for the day, I begin to review the art work that was completed or in progress from the day before. This is my favorite part of the day because this is the time when I really get to focus on just looking at the art and thinking about how each piece fits into the larger puzzle. Does it fit within the design and tone? Is the work consistent with the established style? All of the pieces have to work together to tell a story and they need to be believable in the same world. There are a lot of considerations that have to be made along the way, and I need to be prepared to give productive feedback to each artist on the team on a daily basis including concept artists, character and environments artists, UI artists, and FX artists.
The final concept shown above came after a few iterations with sketches and rough ideas. We wanted the tigers to be strong but they still needed to look agile. We ended up going with a sleeker silhouette that captured the strength and agility of the tiger race much better than the earlier versions
My day to day also includes reviewing story and design material and determining what art will be needed to support the game. This is where I begin to generate art tasks. I take all written descriptions, concept art, consider potential challenges the artist may face with the task, and provide estimates for task completion.
The two sky images above are color studies one of our concept artists made for the Marleybone Skyway in Pirate101. I wanted something that evoked a bit of the familiarity with the time of day from Wizard101 but add a touch of rising sun in the distance to subvert that just slightly. The first image had more of a bright moonlit look and a touch of green in the upper clouds which felt like a storm was brewing. I wanted to achieve a mood that evoked a dark foggy alley way lit by gas lamps at night.
I generally have a wider view of the happenings inside and outside of the art department, so I try to make sure the artist working on a particular task is aware of anything that may affect or influence what they may be working on.
The writers needed the artist to add a suitable place to teleport the player to a location within this zone. It didn’t seem like there was an ideal existing location that was out of the way of player traffic. We decided to add a bridge extension to a spot over the water which seemed to suit everyone’s needs.
The remainder of my day generally consists of a mixture of interactions with various people in different departments. One day may include discussing the next world we may be creating with the writers and designers. Another may be filled with discussing technical issues with a new system and working out how any changes may affect the artists’ pipeline and processes.
I feel like much of my job involves gathering the appropriate materials, providing my own influence and then getting out of the way so the artists have the freedom to add their own creativity into the work.
Of course many challenges and unforeseen issues crop up during the day, so in addition to my normal routine, I have to be flexible enough to jump on anything that may need immediate attention.
Each day I balance making sure the job is done well and on time while providing a work environment that allows the artists the freedom to visualize the story in an exciting way.
This concept was painted for a zone in Aquila. I did not have a lot of changes that I wanted to see after this was completed. I gave the artist some notes up front on the structure seen in the foreground. Other than that he had the freedom to make a cool piece of art!
Melissa Preston
Art Lead
Last time Principal Artist Jeff Toney finished modeling the magic world tree, Bartleby. The 3d model we left you with doesn’t look like Bartleby just yet!
When I left off last post we had Bartleby modeled and were able to walk around him in our custom game client to make sure we liked his size and the shape of his features. Still there was one major step left to do; we had to texture him.
Textures are pictures we create to give the illusion of different materials (in this case the components of the tree) instead of the flat polygons that we had in place. Bartleby was made of bark, but he had a canopy of leaves and his eye looked more like a human eye than one carved out of wood. You might think we would start with painting the textures first, but we first must plot out where the texture will wrap around the object.
In 3d Studio Max, there is a process called UVW Mapping that lets you decide how a texture gets wrapped around an object. Think of the texture as a piece of paper that you can wrap around the object. We could draw on this piece of paper and the model would reflect that change. Like a piece of paper, you can make different shapes with this texture. A single piece of paper could be folded into anything from a cylinder to a square to just the flat paper itself. Since Bartleby was a cylinder at his basic core, we can wrap this paper around him the same way.
Notice the cylinder around Bartleby in the last picture? This is how his texture will be wrapped around him. Our next step was to unfold the piece of paper back into a flat plane. When we did that, his texture looked a lot like this.
This looked a bit like a jumbled mess, but this is usually how we start. Every line and vertex of the 3D Bartleby model is represented here. If you look at the bottom middle of the previous picture, you can see the outline of Bartleby’s face mesh. From this point, we could tweak and move each vertex to get a better “painting canvas” for our texture. In the end of this process, we got a texture map that looked more like this.
That is more like it. You can see his face was as big as possible in the space provided and the general bark was overlapping with itself. I then used this as a first sketch for my final texture.
I started to paint a bark texture over the whole painting. I made it a bit cartoony in style with not a lot of details at this point.
I then added shadows and highlights for his face and eye, and added some moss and grass to the polygons that touched the ground.
I finally add a layer of shadow and light and some detail bark texture to make sure he looked like a tree. For Wizard101, our texture style is cartoony with just a hint of realism. This texture was then mapped to the model that we already had and he looked like this.
That was more like it! After a few tweaks, he was then ready for an effects pass. This was done by a specialized artist who added all the small environmental animations that surrounded the tree. This included beams of sunlight, small leaves floating down, wind, rain, and anything that helped give the scene more life. After a round of effects, here was the final Bartleby as he is in the game.
I am very proud to have worked on Wizard101 for so long, and always get a kick out of walking around Ravenwood with my characters, knowing that I helped create the great, wise tree that is the center of this magical school. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope it helped in showing a bit of the process of how I make art in Wizard101!
Jeff Toney
Principal Artist
This past week, KingsIsle had the honor of hosting a wonderful young man and his immediate family. Ryan is an 11-year old boy who chose to visit KingsIsle and Pirate101 through the Make-a-Wish organization and was accompanied by his 14-year old brother, 16-year old sister and his parents. Here at KingsIsle we did everything we could to make a memorable experience for him.
Welcome to KingsIsle Ryan and family!
The whole family arrived at 9:30 am, and after a brief look around we introduced him to the 250+ employees here in the Austin office as our newest Pirate101 Honorary Producer. The kickoff was led by KingsIsle’s Senior Producer, William Haskins, who really went above and beyond organizing an incredible visit and some special surprises for Ryan. In addition to these surprises the team put together, the Pirate producers, Jay Gordon and Mike Stone, also worked to pull together a “treasure chest” with an assortment of appropriate goodies.
William introduces Ryan to everyone as the new Pirate101 Honorary Producer
After the introduction, Ryan sailed off to an in-office recording studio we had set up where he and his family got to meet a number of our Pirate101 voice actors. Ryan also met with all the folks in our Sound department to learn how sounds are built into our games, and then he stepped up the mic himself to give voice recording a go. We had some stealthy lines for Ryan to record for a purpose, but we tried to work them in with a bunch other fun voice over lines to help hide what was really up our sleeves . . . .
Recording voice over in the studio
After a short break, Ryan whisked off to one of our conference rooms where he got to play his character on a computer hooked up to a large-screen TV surrounded by KingsIsle’s Creative Director & Vice President, Josef Hall; Pirate101’s Community Manager, Tom Purdue; Lead Creative Designer, Sam Johnson; and a number of other Pirate101 folks. I honestly had a hard time trying to figure out what was giving Ryan more pleasure: leveling up all the new companions we had put on his account, running around Aquila asking Sam for some of the integral details behind the story, or defeating Satyrs in Achaea side-by-side with Tom. The hour we spent in that room went incredibly fast, and Ryan’s parents had to almost pry him away from the computer to hit one of our break rooms before having lunch with a large group of KingsIsle employees.
Playing Pirate101
After lunch Ryan got to put his new title of Pirate101 Honorary Producer to the test. He appropriately started with the resident Pirate101 producers who gave him some background on their jobs and showed him how to track a bug from putting it into the system all the way until it gets fixed. He then got to go and spend time with each department, learning about art and animation, game design and story development. He also got to spend some time on one of Pirate101’s internal servers and be the first non-KingsIsle employee to see a few yet unreleased “cool” things that are coming soon. He really did great work with the designers and was able to give us some very good and specific feedback 🙂
Learning Production with Pirate101 Producers Jay and Mike
Giving feedback on brand new animations and effects
Working with the design team
Participating in a story session
Toward the end of the day we brought Ryan and his family back to the conference room and reveal the special “treats” we had up our sleeves. The first was a custom poster that Josef presented to Ryan that had Ryan’s in-game character surrounded by his top companions. It was a beautiful one-of-a-kind original done by one of our very talented concept artists, Nick Overdiek. We had made sure to have a little time left so we could “let” Ryan jump back into the Pirate101 internal test server again. Here he got to see the newest addition to the Pirate101 game: a Yum-n-ade stand manned by none other than Ryan the Relentless, complete with voice over lines he had performed that very morning. It took a lot of quick work and a few weeks of prior planning, but the Pirate101 team had created a new NPC with Ryan’s in-game character so he will forever forward be known as the NPC vendor for the Yum-n-ade stand. You can check him out in the live game this week 🙂
Josef Hall presents Ryan his poster
Ryan the Relentless’ Custom Poster
Ryan, his family, and the some Pirate101 team members
If you want to learn more about Ryan and his story, check out local Austin news source KVUE’s story on his day at KingsIsle. You can show KVUE and Ryan a little extra appreciation by clicking the share button on the KVUE site to share their story on Facebook or Twitter.
I’m pretty sure Ryan and his family had a great time. What I do know for certain is that everyone at KingsIsle had an amazing time getting ready for the visit and then spending the day with them. We were truly honored that Ryan and his family chose to come spend a precious day with us!
Fred Howard
Vice President of Marketing
Watch a Video of Ryan’s Day at KingsIsle
Sponsoring giveaways, answering questions, and keeping players up to date on the latest game news are just a few of the many tasks our wonderful community managers are faced with on a daily basis! Today we ask Wizard101’s Professor Greyrose and Pirate101’s One-Eyed Jack a few questions about what it’s like to be a community manager at KingsIsle.
What made you want to work with the gaming community?
Professor Greyrose: Like others, I came from being a community leader and working on the press side for another game, to being a Community Manager for KingsIsle. Being engaged in a game and being a part of its community is definitely a driving factor in wanting to work with the players.
One-Eyed Jack: KingsIsle is notorious for having the most amazing communities out there—of course, I’m partial since I came directly from the grassroots of the Wizard101 community myself. Being the Pirate101 Community Manager seemed like a natural fit for me. In truth there’s nothing finer than working for the greater good of a community. When it’s for something you love as much as the community does, I feel there’s a kind of synergy possible that’s hard to replicate and extremely satisfying. I feel our common goal is to enjoy the heck out of Pirate101 and make it an awesome experience that won’t be forgotten. It’s a lot to live up to, but One-Eyed Jack (um, that’s me) hopes you will always remember your time spent in Pirate101.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
One-Eyed Jack: My favorite part of my job is simply seeing what player ingenuity can bring to Pirate101. Many years back in a commercial writing class, I had a teacher tell me that creativity at its basis is the mixing of things/ideas. When I see people mixing their talents of art, music, writing, and role-playing along with the amazing world of Pirate101, it just makes me really happy and proud of our Pirate101 creative community. Getting to see players throw themselves into the game and really be passionate about it is something that can turn “just an OK day” into “a great day”!
Professor Greyrose: Like One-Eyed Jack, the most rewarding part of the job is seeing how our games inspire others to be creative in their own way. From fan art and sculptures to cake decorating and costume making – these extracurricular activities really show how our players bring the game into their lives and make it their own.
Now that you know how much our fantastic community leaders love your creative efforts, why not send them some Wizard101 or Pirate101 inspired creativity of your own! Send us your drawings, paintings and sketches of your character or anything else you’ve imagined about Wizard101. If you are under 13 years of age, ask your parent or guardian for permission to send us your artwork.
If you would like to submit something, send it in an email to community@wizard101.com, community@pirate101.com or mail it to us at KingsIsle Entertainment, P.O. Box 82543, Austin TX USA, 78708 and be sure to include your character name!
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