We pitched Toontown Online as the first attraction of Disney's "online theme park" and started pre-production in 2000. The Team The core team was 12 or 13 people for most of the development cycle. The only significant out-sourcing was for sound and music production, which was done by SoundDelux. The team size has stayed relatively constant, although the mix has shifted more towards operations people as we have scaled back on building new technology in favor of adding more game features. High-Level Goals Our primary goal was to build a fun game for kids of all ages. This meant that the game had to be safer, friendlier, and easier to learn than other MMOs. We targeted mini-games, cooperative turn-based combat with easy grouping, and open-ended socializing as our main types of gameplay. We realized prior to launch that we would need a well-designed tutorial and that our game would have to be completely downloadable, even over narrowband. Our goals haven't really changed much since launch. Technology Our primary technology goals were for the game to be completely downloadable, to have safe communication between players, and to have a unique look and feel. For the game to be downloadable, we had to keep the footprint small, minimize initial and ongoing bandwidth, and basically compress everything as much as possible. #TOONTOWN INFINITE LIVE SERVER PASSWORD#įor safe communication, we developed "Speedchat", which is a menu-based chat system, and "Secret Friends", which uses a password exchanged outside of the game to enable two players to talk to each other in game. Finally, we built our own graphics engine internally so that we could have a unique look and feel while still keeping within a limited polygon and texture budget. We licensed the Miles sound library from RAD, and made significant use of open-source software, including the Python scripting language and CVS, a version control system, to help compensate for the small number of software developers on the project. Development Timeline The project was conceived in 1999, and the initial plan was to release late summer 2001. We ended up releasing over a year later than we originally planned because we decided to extend beta testing and to launch in stages to give us a chance to build up awareness in the market and to refine the business model. This also gave us the opportunity to add new features to the game that we had not included in our original scope. #TOONTOWN INFINITE LIVE SERVER PASSWORD#Ĭhanges 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.#TOONTOWN INFINITE LIVE SERVER SOFTWARE#.
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