It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of work to get done here at KingsIsle, with two major MMOs running and lots of secret projects in the works! Even though we work hard, we also play hard. About once a month, KingsIsle employees from all different departments get together for a company sponsored fun day. These fun days range from playing board games at the office to going to the Austin food bank and lending a helping hand. Last week we headed to a new Austin sensation, Top Golf, to practice our swing!
Top Golf takes the concept of working on your golf game to a new level by adding targets to the driving range and special micro-chipped balls that track each player’s score. Being a bunch of gamers, we obviously enjoyed turning golf into a live action mini game!
We have some impressive golfers here at KingsIsle! I however, am not one of them and was very content to hit the not-so-very-far-in red and yellow targets. Hey, not everyone can be Tiger Woods!
Even though my drives were pretty close in, we had some golfers with quite a bit of oomph behind their swing. Wait a second, is this golf or baseball? I thought the balls were supposed to hit the targets… not the cars!
Of course, not everyone felt like golfing. Many people here are gamers through and through, and that’s not limited to just computer games. Just inside the driving range, several intense tabletop games were going on like Settlers of Catan and WizWar.
Whether you played golf or games, this latest fun day was a great way to relax and socialize with co-workers outside of the office. Having a fun day like this leaves us refreshed and ready for more hard work ahead. Plus who knows, we may get some cool ideas from these outings! Wizard golfing anyone? Just kidding, but you never know… 🙂
Lauren Mauldin
Marketing Website Producer
Howdy fellow Wizards! I’m Gary Scott Smith, but you may know me in game as Duncan DayDreamer. On the forums I post as Arthur Wethersfield. I’m a game programmer that’s been working on Wizard101 for almost 5 years. I first started with player housing. Then I did mannequins, pets and mounts in housing, the maze game, gardening, housing games, wands on walls, housing music players, housing signs, housing teleporters, the Bric-a-Brac Elixir, the Additional Castle Elixir, buy more and sell more, spectator mode, playable musical instruments… and lots of other things!
I have a Wizard101 character that I’ve been playing since launch. As of this post, I’m level 81 and near the beginning of Azteca. My character’s primary school is Storm. With Storm, all fights are over quickly, one way or the other. I also have a level 51 character in Pirate101.
My focus at work is player housing, and other than questing, that’s my main aspect of playing Wizard101 as well. Since we added the Additional Castle Elixir I have been able to buy, acquire, or craft every house in the game – 32 at the moment! I’ve decorated most of them too.
For this blog post, I wanted to share my favorite house. Yes, I know that there are bigger and fancier houses… but I’ve always liked the Wooded Cottage. I enjoy the Wizard City sky in the background and the cottage’s cozy interior.
By the way, did you know that the unicorn that periodically appears in the grove was added before you could put pets in your houses? Now if you want, you can fill the house with unicorn pets and the unicorn that lives in the grove isn’t really necessary, but we’d never remove it!
I crafted the carousel at this house before gardening existed and farming Wintertusk made Black Pearls and Earthquake treasure cards easier to acquire. I sure spent a lot of time gathering Black Lotus in MooShu so I could craft that carousel!
I think it’s important for developers to play the games they work on, both to be familiar with the content and to thoroughly understand what works well and what doesn’t. For example, I implemented “buy more” and “sell more” features after slowly buying and selling reagents one by one… over and over! It made me wish there was a better way. I recently alphabetized the crafting recipes in our crafted recipe lists after hunting for one randomly listed recipe one too many times. For similar reasons, I like to know what players are saying about Wizard101. I read lots of blog posts; I scan our forums, the Wizard101Central forums and I listen to Ravenwood Radio.
The future is full of exciting things! See you in the spiral.
Gary Scott Smith
Senior Software Engineer II
Today we have a real treat for any young players interested in working in the gaming industry one day. Cheryl Starcher, a Lead Software Engineer here at KingsIsle, has taken some time to let us know a little bit about her background and what can help an aspiring player become a game programmer one day!
I love my job. Here’s how I got to this position and why you might also love a job as a game programmer.
I graduated from Duke University with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a second major in Computer Science. I worked for IBM in their server group doing logic design and verification using C++ while getting a masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Eventually I reached a point where I wanted to do something more creative and that’s when I went to work for KingsIsle. I’ve been working on Wizard101 since before it launched and I still love it.
Having a four-year degree and work experience with C++ opened the door for me into the game industry. Luckily for me, KingsIsle was working on MMO games which are the most complicated and challenging type of game to program. They involve a huge codebase and major technical challenges. Supporting the game after launch is just as challenging as we keep adding more features making the code more complex, and fixing problems while maintaining the data we have (you can’t solve a problem by starting over from scratch).
KingsIsle also supports a lower min-spec machine than is typical for an MMO so we jump through hoops to keep the game accessible and we debug problems that only exist on odd pieces of old hardware. We’ve localized the game for different languages including Asian languages, which are an additional challenge. With our partner, CodeWeavers, we support the Mac. I can’t say enough about how interesting it is to be a game programmer and encounter such a variety of challenges.
I recommend that anyone who wants to be a game programmer one day should get a four-year degree in Computer Science. I also recommend that you play games – all kinds of games including board games! Even though a four-year degree and gaming experience are great, the thing that is really going to get you that game job is making your own games. Start off simple and make something you can show to other people. This is what shows future employers your dedication and ability to figure things out. I’ve listed some free resources below that one of my fellow programmers, Gary, has compiled that should help you get started making games.
As a final word of advice, being a game programmer requires someone who thinks logically and is creative. Programming teaches you precise attention to detail, but allows you to solve a problem in multiple ways. Any code you write is an expression of yourself and all of the training and knowledge you acquire allows that expression to work as intended.
Cheryl Starcher
Lead Software Engineer
Some Resources to Make Your Own Games
- Make Games Now – Scratch and Alice are free programming environments which support making simple games.
- Resources for programming more complex games
When you think of your grandmother, what’s the first image that comes to your mind? Knitting? Home baked cookies? What about her logging on to the computer with a headset, gearing up for an intense match of PvP! Since online gaming has many benefits for the senior community, playing alongside your grandparents might be a lot more realistic than you think.
Bob Stephen of AARP recently did a blog series about the benefits of gaming for the senior community. This is something we have always felt very strongly about here at KingsIsle – gaming can and should be something everyone can enjoy regardless of age! We’ve always believed that developing deep content woven with layered humor that played on many levels was a key way to attract a broad audience. We also maintain that creating challenging game play that scales with game progress really brings along many casual (and non) gamers. By pulling all this together our goal was to create virtual worlds for gamers of all ages to connect with their loved ones no matter how far away they live in the real world. Well, that and have a great time and a lot of fun while playing!
In his blogging series, Bob Stephen touches on this cross generational gaming in relation to the senior community:
The virtual world aspect of Wizard101 and similar games provide participants with an opportunity to interact and get to know others — all from the comfort of home. There are certainly similarities to social media where friends can be made based on shared interest — but the game environment adds a twist in that you can do things together while making friends or staying connected.
Besides being able to connect with family from across the country, online games like Wizard101 and Pirate101 offer seniors a chance to be just as “hip” and knowledgeable as younger gamers. Think about it – when you’re in a tough duel with a boss and a nice player helps you beat the bad guy, you don’t care how old they may be or where they’re from… you’re just glad they helped you win! Everyone is on a level playing field in the virtual world.
In Stephen’s article, Games for the 50+: A New Outlet for Mentoring, a senior KingsIsle player comments on being a gaming mentor:
In a world where many young people are abandoned to their own abilities I found a new world of young people willing to work with and learn from us old guys.
– jagarland61
So next time you talk to your Grandparents, see if they’d be interested in doing a little online gaming. You never know… Grandpa might just be the epic Life Wizard that you need to round out your PvP team! Do any of you game online with your grandparents? Or grandparents, do you game with your family? If so, tell us about it in the comment area below!
Lauren Mauldin
Marketing Website Producer
Last week, Principal Artist Jeff Toney gave us a glimpse into the evolution of Bartleby through a series of original art concepts. This week in part 2, Jeff shares how Bartleby turned from a 2d drawing into a 3d model!
After the round of concepts, we had several ideas that solidified what we wanted with our magical tree. We wanted a face that had an old, wise look in the side of the tree. Bartleby also needed a rough moustache of bark growing around his mouth to mark the entrance of his teleporter to other worlds in the Spiral. With this in mind, I sketched out a rough idea about Bartleby and the surrounding schools in Ravenwood.
I made this sketch to show people what I planned to model, and then was given comments and suggestions to make this a better model. Since making a video game is a team project, having easy steps to see the progress as it is happening is always good. It is much easier (and cheaper) to make changes in the sketch, then it is to make them after we go to a 3D model in the game. After some revisions, my sketch was approved and I could then go to the 3D model!
At KingsIsle we use 3D Studio Max for all of our modeling work in the game. It is a versatile program that is used in many video game studios. When you start modeling, you always begin with a basic object that is closest to your final model. For a building I would start with a box, but since Bartleby is round I started with a cylinder.
At this stage, all we wanted is a simple shape of Bartleby. We call this a “proxy”. The proxy is the next stage in the process from translating the sketch we created to a final 3D model. Using this Bartleby proxy, we could walk around it in our level editor and see if we liked the size and shape of the object so far.
Looks good! The size of the tree feels good and the tree roots are not too small. I imagined myself as a player walking up to Bartleby for the first time. I should feel some awe in such a great, big, magical tree but he should also have a sense of peace around him. He is, after all, the source of all magic in the Spiral.
Next, we started moving polygons around. Polygons are 3D virtual triangles that make up everything in an object. They are made up of points in 3D space called vertices. The surface of the triangle is called a polygon. The more polygons you have in a tree, the more “smooth” the surface of the tree will be. Think of this as “virtual clay”. Since there is only one Bartleby in the scene (as opposed to 5 different school buildings and tens of trees around the level), we could make him have some more polygons to his face and branches and roots than other, smaller trees in the level.
This is what we have so far. He does not look like Bartleby quite yet, but you can definitely see the direction we are going. In the next post I will show you how we added a texture to his surface that resembles bark, moss and leaves — everything that looks like a tree!
Stay tuned for part 3 where we will turn Bartleby into the final tree that you know and love in Wizard101.
Jeff Toney
Principal Artist
KingsIsle Blog 