Toontown Online Wrap Report

Changes and Enhancements Before launch, and nearly six months into development, we decided to switch scripting languages because the language we had chosen turned out to be impractical for a project of this scope. We basically had to start over, but it was not all bad. Our code was probably better due to being re-written, and we have been happy with the versatility and performance of the Python scripting language.

Since launch, we have added a considerable amount of new content. The most notable would be Cog headquarters (which included new environments, enemies and gameplay), fishing, special events (fishing tournaments, Cog invasions, fireworks and holiday decorations), customizable houses on private estates, and most recently, pets.

Our cartoon-themed world is original, sets us apart from other MMOs, and helps us reach a diverse audience of players.

Major Challenges Our two biggest challenges during development were 1) designing a rich compelling 3D world that could be delivered entirely over the Internet, and 2) making sure this same game could run on a fairly low-end PC. Choosing a cartoon-themed world certainly helped make downloading possible, because cartoon art tends to compress really well, and this also helped us maintain a lower minimum platform.

Our two biggest challenges since launch have been 1) educating the mass market (and parents in particular) about MMO games, and 2) deciding on which features to build next to enhance the game. The best education about MMOs comes from playing one, so we think we've been successful at making our game easy to try out, and the results are evident in the large number of first-time players who have become subscribers. As for new features, we still have a lot of momentum and new ideas are constantly flying around. Because we have such a diverse population in terms of age, gender and game experience level, we try and release some new content that's fun for everyone and some content that's targeted to specific groups of players.

Best Decisions The best decisions we made during development were to provide a lot of variety in the avatars and to leave room for expansion of the game.

We debated how diverse our population of Toons should be, and decided that we needed nearly a million different potential combinations. We wanted people to identify with their Toon, and thought that being able to customize it was an important factor.

Leaving room for expansion of our game was actually pretty easy. Toons have the ability to teleport to locations or each other by simply pulling out a "portable hole" and jumping into it, so adding new locations doesn't necessarily require us to change existing real estate. As a result, we've been able to keep adding new areas without having to modify a lot of existing content.

The best decision we've made since launch has been to provide a free trial. All you need is an Internet connection and a PC with a 3D graphics card and you can try out our game. This has really helped us reach a broader audience than would otherwise have been possible.

Key Strengths We think our key strengths are the following: 1) Our cartoon-themed world is original, sets us apart from other MMOs, and helps us reach a diverse audience of players. 2) We succeeded in keeping kids safe while letting them communicate. 3) Our live team is fantastic. They manage to keep things running smoothly even during the craziest moments. Keeping an MMO up is an amazing challenge sometimes.

Areas for Improvement Probably the most significant thing that did not work out so well was our automatic filter for names submitted by users. We initially let people create their own character names, and planned to filter them for inappropriate language. What we quickly learned was that creating a perfect filter is an intractable problem, and it became a game in itself for some people to try and defeat the name filter.

Our solution was to provide a large set of "Toony" and appropriate words that could be used to generate names, and if a player still wanted to create their own, we made them submit for approval by an actual human. It turned out that the name generator was fun in its own right, and it really helped people get into the spirit of the game.

Lessons Learned We learned many important lessons while developing Toontown. Massively multiplayer games are really tough to build and operate. You must be an expert in many diverse areas, from the obvious things like game design and graphics programming to things we had to learn from scratch, like international billing, web development and server hosting. An important lesson is to hire experts in each area. For a long time, through beta and early launch, many of the developers were wearing many hats, trying to build the game in the morning, develop web pages in the afternoon and field customer service e-mails at night. Once we found qualified people to specialize in each area, our service quality and overall happiness improved drastically. It was fun to learn the parts of the business first-hand, but nice when we could hand pieces off to people we knew would do a professional job.

Building Toontown was difficult, but building up market awareness of Toontown is even harder. It is difficult to educate to a parent or non-gamer what makes an MMO unique and worth paying by subscription. Overcoming Internet fears about privacy, child safety and credit card hacking were big hurdles, but things are improving rapidly in these areas. Leveraging the trust in the Disney brand was a big win for us, but we had to deliver on that trust. We spent a huge part of our schedule on focus testing, building safety features and tweaking our marketing.

One lesson we will take with us into future development is that downloadable games can work as a business. The entire Toontown client is only 30 or 40 megabytes, which is downloaded in pieces while you are playing. The download made viral and television marketing extremely effective and more profitable as a business. We intend to keep building this channel as we develop future products.