Monday, November 23, 2020

The Sweet Satisfaction of Karamelle in Wizard101

 Oh this world, my friends. Can you believe this world?

It's like Disneyland and Willy Wonka got together with Swiss Miss and held a party.

First, a little backstory. It all started back in 2009 when (as I foggily remember it being recounted to me) Kiersten Samwell wandered into the Wizard101 writers and after a little quick brainstorming, Professor Greyrose had a new bit of lore to share with the fans of Wizard101 through answering a question on an interview I was doing with her for this blog.  From that time, players of Wizard101 were always listing "Candy World" as a possible world of the Spiral they would someday visit.

Fast forward to 2012, after getting hired at KingsIsle as Pirate101's community manager, I came up with an idea to make these really cool "Rogue's Gallery" spotlights. To get them done, I worked with Sam Johnson of the writing team and Damon Brown, our video production guru. Sam would get me the text, I would grab the video footage, and Damon would put them all together with some voice over. We ended up making 29 of these videos.  It was a huge effort to put these together every month.

Eventually, we hired on Leala Ulrich and she took up the mantle to make professor spotlight videos for all the Wizard101 professors in kind of a "Rogue's Gallery" style production called the "Ravenwood Roll Call." The hardest of these to make seemed to be the spotlight for Professor Greyrose. In 2015 Leala went to all kinds of lengths to get the video and assets she needed to make this video. In addition Leala worked with the writers for the lore and story in the video, and this is really when the rough lore idea for "Candy World" then solidified into the world of The Spiral known as "Karamelle."


And here we are now in 2020, and the amazing Wizard101 team has unleashed a cheerful bunch of joyful content known as Karamelle, Wizard101's latest world of the Spiral . . . and I'm playing through it with my wife in its fully realized state. The Wizard101 team has really outdone itself!

Riding around in our cookie cars is the sweetest way to experience Karamelle together.

We're only a few hours in at this point, and it's been super fun.  We've fought marshmallows, gummy worms, gobblers, witches, gummy bears, and even cotton candy rams with candy cane horns. "Candy World" is everything I dreamed it would be and more.

The actually growl like a Tiger. Hilarious.

I really love this world so far and can't wait to play through it over this week with my wife.  If you see us in game, please say hello! 

Hope you all are enjoying "Candy World" as much as I am.

Happy dueling!

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