EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ~ Toontown Rewritten (Joey Z.)

[Shamus The Brute]

Ahoy everyone.

I welcome you to this very special and exclusive forums interview. On behalf of Toontown Rewritten's "Creative Director" - Joey Z., I invite each of you to the below Q&A session to which Joey himself was kind enough to participate in and conduct despite his own busy schedule.

​

(Credit for all 'bigger' TTR logo art goes to TheWolfGalaxy of Deviantart)​

Below, you will discover that the legacy of Toontown Rewritten (TTR) is not unlike that of TLOPO. While each remake does face it's own unique circumstances and challenges, the end result and goal has always had community members/gamers in mind. In TTR's case, this is especially true since TTR has essentially paved the way for all (Disney) MMO remakes to model themselves after and to follow. Hence, it is a great pleasure of mine to introduce you to Joey Z. of TTR (for this 'fourth' exclusive interview series available for you here on piratesforums.co).

​

1.) First of all, how are you doing? What is going on new within your world and what things could you share about a typical week of yours to where you must juggle added responsibilities of your own life now with the responsibilities of furthering the development of TTR?

It's funny, a lot of times you can track how busy I am just by the rate of posts appearing on our blog. I'm one of those people who rarely has a set schedule every week. While my classes are set for certain times of course, I'm a bit spontaneous with my plans in terms of not having a weekly routine. I think I'd drive myself insane if I tried to plan out every little thing that needs doing! The way I manage it though, is that Toontown seems to always be in the back of my mind. I'm constantly thinking "Hmm, need to work on a blog post for this weekend," "Halloween is coming up soon -- gotta make sure that update gets tested," "What's going on with the community? How do they feel about the way things are going?" and then I've got the long term things too. "I need to talk with the art team about how our next project is coming along," "I should email our convention organizers about our plans for next year," "Are we heading in a good direction?"

While it's tough to manage all of that, over the past few years I've made it work fairly well. My life would have a bit of a void in it without all of the many things TTR does to keep me busy, and including free time for myself is important too. I could and would even love to spend every second improving the game, but eventually I'll burn my brain to bits if I don't make sure to include some real free time for myself. I think that's what I struggle with most.​

2.) You are actively pursuing a college education. In your words, is the college experience actually helping you to decide or to resolve which particular direction you would like to go once graduation arrives? For yourself, is it too early to tell at this point - for you? (If you feel the experience is overly helping you, what remain your goals for the next five years)?

​

I feel that I'm in a unique situation compared to a lot of individuals my age. I came into college with not only real-world experience, but real-world experience that could be considered career level. That's an immense blessing that I have, but it's made it difficult for me to decide what the best route is for my current education. I'm one who likes a challenge, and where I'm at right now it seems as if I won't truly be challenged by my education for a couple of years, to catch up with what I've learned through Toontown Rewritten. A lot of people talk to look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that: Why would I want to add even more to my workload? I've been weighing my options here, but ultimately I can't give much advice since I myself am still working to figure out which path is best for my situation. If one thing's for sure, though, I'll be trying my best to push the boundaries.​

3.) On the internet and online, in consideration to the demand for private game servers/remakes which exist, could you share with us a few pros and cons you have resolved to conclude in light of your own experience (or the experience others have mentioned to you) pertinent to the development of TTR?

​

Toontown Rewritten is such a unique case, and I make sure that my team doesn't take that for granted. I like to remind them that we've literally made history with some of the things that we've accomplished. We've astonished a lot of people to have made it this far, even ourselves. The original creator of Toontown, Jesse Schell, once said to me: "It opens the question of whether or not games are meant to truly die after their owners have finished with them. Should they be put to rest, or should their upkeep be turned to the community?"

There's a lot of pros and cons that come with this, however. As volunteers who have no executives or monetary constraints on our creative decisions, we have been able to do a whole lot of good for the game. It's just incredible to be able to pour out our creativity with all of the ideas, events, and tweaks that we wanted to make when Disney was in charge. That said, it's a hard thing as part-time volunteers to attempt to do what full time employees did. Toontown needs and deserves a lot of love, and we can't always fulfill that gap. As a unique case, we don't have much that we can compare ourselves to when it comes to voluntarily running a game server of this proportion. We're literally writing the book on this stuff -- and that's a scary thing.​

4.) Taking into consideration the insight you do have today, what remains the biggest challenge facing yourself (or any given TTR developer) in light of the remaking of TTO?

​

Doodles. The Toontown players will laugh at that. Boy are they a pain.

In seriousness, I'd say that our biggest struggle comes from what I mentioned about "writing the book" on running a massive game server like this one. We face issues all the time that we have to think for ourselves on how to solve. There's no way to go to Google and type "How can I keep Toontown running?" -- we have to come up with our own answers for that.​

 

[Shamus The Brute]

continued -

5.) Probably the greatest consensus I keep hearing with the ex-POTCO community is that everyone simply "wants to play." Rightfully so, everyone misses their beloved game. In your opinion, does the need for a player to want to relive again one's own memory overrule prudent judgment in so far as the decision made to choose a quicker, more unstable remake over another where quality itself rules-the-land/where quality itself is not compromised?

For the first two weeks that we started working on our server-sided engine for Toontown Rewritten, Astron, it was built with the intent of getting players back into Toontown as fast as possible. That's when one of our lead developers, Sam ("Shockley" as he's known as in game), stepped in and said "No, no. This isn't going to work!" and we started from the ground up with quality in mind. Thank goodness he did that, because we would have never made it to where we are today otherwise. While all of us wanted Toontown to return as soon as possible, we couldn't give up on quality because of that. If we had continued to move forward and build Astron as quickly as possible with little regards to building it to last, Toontown Rewritten would not be as it is today. We try to upkeep that in everything we do now. If we want our game to last, it needs to be built to last.

That said, we did a lot to keep the players entertained. The Daily Alpha Update was a strategy of mine to keep players entertained while we slowly chiseled away at making Toontown what it needed to be. It took a long time, a lot of frustration and patience, but ultimately it paid off by giving us a well-built game and an immensely dedicated community.​

6.) A few questions now about Disney, if you don't mind. What remains your stance on Disney? In your opinion, why have they remained so silent and/or overly ignored TTR's/TLOPO's accomplishments thus far?

Disney is a great company -- they're the ones who made Toontown and POTCO, after all. Likewise, they're exactly that: a company. And they did what they thought was best for their games. I think that Disney may have acted a little too soon though, because the fact of the matter is that Toontown and POTCO weren't truly ready to die. Despite Disney's decision to kill the game, the games are still living. And I think Disney finds that to be really really interesting.

We're running Toontown Rewritten with no profit and upkeeping it as if we are Disney, which I think has given them enough proof that we aren't a big threat to them. In fact, we could be a big help. If they ever decide to bring Toontown back in some form, we're preserving their playerbase so that they'll get all the more popularity when they decide that it's time.​

7.) With what you do know about Disney, does a POTCO remake actually have more to lose in comparison to a TTO remake (on account of the difference in both 'brand' and intellectual property)? If you acknowledge a difference, shouldn't something as controversial as public donations be avoided to deter a remake from overly gaining Disney's (watchful) eye?

​

There's definitely a difference when it comes to POTCO, since as you mentioned Disney has an active watch on the Pirates of the Caribbean brand. They have a new movie coming out, too. For us, donations have always been absolutely outlawed. We're doing this as a volunteer project, and the cost of that is something that we take responsibility for as well. Public donations just seem like a bad idea, especially in this case, because people are going to be searching for POTC more and more frequently as time goes on. Disney isn't going to want any of their potential merchandising profit to be spent on something that they aren't receiving benefits from. That's my take on it, at least.​

8.) A June 16, 2014 (Bloomberg.com) news article highlighted not only your involvement with TTR but also your remake's success. Could you share what you learned from that experience and whether or not the added press helped or hindered TTR to further remain "under-the-radar" if that were a goal of TTR?

​

When going forward with the Bloomberg interview, there was definitely an acknowledgement that our project wasn't just a small little fan revival anymore. This was the real deal, and that was both exciting and scary. At that point we had earned the support of Jesse Schell, however, in addition to some other former Disney employees who reached out to us and said that they really appreciated what we were doing and thought that their colleagues would too. We decided to take the leap of faith, because we were confident in our ability to run the game in a way that Disney would approve of. It's been two years since then, and after hitting 1,000,000 registered players I'd say that we've accomplished that really well!​

9.) Discuss how excited you are about TTR's future direction?

The game is going through a lot of changes right now. We've grown a lot in a very short amount of time, and we've hosted conventions that attracted hundreds of players from even outside of the country. We have a lot in store, but right now we're taking some time to regroup and figure out how we should handle moving forward. There's some big projects in the works that require more organization than we've ever needed in the past, but we know that our players are dedicated enough to stick with us through it. Over the course of the next year you can expect to see some big changes for our public image. Before moving forward, we want to really polish the existing game and make it perfect so that we're ready to bring in even more new players.​

10.) All remakes experience their own share of set-backs and/or misdirection. Could you briefly comment upon the issue of "stolen code" (or code received without permission) in lieu of both past and current circumstances facing online communities whom seek to experience the return of a game MMO?

​

Back in the early days of Toontown, there were a lot of people jealous of what we were doing. When Toontown went down, there were hackers who kind of dominated the community and they stuck around for the first few months of the game's revival. They managed to get our source code, which resulted in a sudden surge of many other Toontown servers popping up saying "Hey, we're better than Toontown Rewritten!" -- using our own code. Talk about an "oof" moment. As time went on though, it was clear that these servers weren't going to last because while they kept using our old code, we kept fixing up and improving ours. They couldn't make those same fixes, in a lot of cases.

So really in the end, the issue of "stolen code" was an unimportant one. If it ever happens to your project, just keep your head high and keep working until your code is even better than the version they stole. You know what they say about cheaters, after all.

--
Joey Z.​

​

 

[Stormtimbers]

Question 7 + 10 = roasted

 

[Rouhan]

Thank you for sharing this. I'm currently addicted to this game, it really is incredibly fun to play, and it's nice to see that Joey shares the same mindset as (most of) us here.

 

[Dreadful]

Great interview. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Shamus The Brute]

Great interview. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for enjoying it. Credit goes to Joey Z., for agreeing to participate.