Shrapnel building a Web3 first-person shooter game

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have back with us Don norbury the head of Studio at shrapnel game Dawn welcome back to the show it is a pleasure to see you again thanks Ashton pleasure to be back I'm excited to dive into the latest updates for for shrapnel I know this is a huge amazing game that is a long

0:23process to get it out but it is I think one of the most exciting releases for games in web3 I'm personally excited about um it's it's going to be hard to match uh what I think that your team is building I would love to just start from the top for those who haven't seen our previous interviews and aren't familiar with shrapnel if you could just talk a

0:45little bit about what is shrapnel the game and then we'll dive into all the latest details yeah for sure I mean shrapnel is uh an FPS extraction shooter um so you know a type of game similar to something like escape from tarkov or you gotta get in and get out with your stuff high stakes treasure hunting and then kind of surrounding it is a huge set of

1:07ugc tools so people can make their Brand Build Maps build their own insignias build weapon skins of course publish them own them equip them but also trade them very cool and with fps's you know some of the greatest most popular games in the world have been FPS games can you talk a little bit about your experience in building an FPS and how to build a

1:32great game uh yeah for sure I mean I've built um a few of them you know I think Bioshock was probably the one I get the most attention for um our entire team has uh history and pedigree and building um FPS games they are one of the hardest uh to build for a number of design and Technical um reasons but uh you know we've certainly um kind of tread that territory before

1:57uh yeah we've we saw extraction shooter as sort of the next space the next kind of Evergreen design space to get into we felt like Battle Royale um has you know there's still plenty to explore uh there you know it's certainly like a lot of people still enjoy it there's something visceral and amazing about it but um we you know we wanted to get into extraction and specially kind of saw it

2:22um married with digital ownership um with kind of building with a blockchain economy from the ground up as being just a natural marriage uh especially when you bring in the ability for people to create their own stuff um that's exciting I want to dive into that a little bit but you know I I saw the trailer and I want to talk about that after but can you talk a little bit

2:42more about the world that you're in and like sort of the dystopian uh back setting of the story because I know it's really interesting and I feel like that's why a lot of people love this game I yeah I would say you know the um the founding team uh we all came out of HBO and of course we we'd all been through the ringers at lucasfilm and Xbox and take two and whatnot

3:06um but I think our our HBO uh meeting is where we all worked intimately with each other and closely with each other uh and of course HBO is all about narrative World building telling a story being invested in character so we had a lot of that juice coming out of HBO and and forming neon and building shrapnel so we spent a lot of time with that World

3:27building you know the the premise of shrapnel is uh that you know it's a it's kind of near future so it's not super future we're not talking you know hundreds of years in the future uh we're talking like 15 to 20 years in the future and basically asteroid mining uh had become a thing you know we're kind of at the cusp of that already you can see um in you know interest in that there's

3:50good reason there's tons of valuable resources on asteroids right they're kind of like the next Frontier in terms of getting those resources so it's that industry had kind of Spun up uh in a catastrophic event happens and basically um the moon gets hit an asteroid hits the moon uh and then it in turn rains shrapnel uh down on the earth which is where the actual name for the game comes

4:12from most people it's a little subversive most people they're like oh that's a military shooter shrapnel right you got a shrapnel grenade or whatever like no it's actually you know the moon raining down the shrapnel on the earth um so you know as this happens of course there's valuable minerals valuable elements all over the Earth this is all coming down it's not just pieces of the

4:31Moon as pieces of the asteroid and so these different companies and government organizations go to actually extract that and they find that there's something else in there a thing we call compound Sigma that has um powerful effects I guess the best way to put it and it becomes effectively this conflict compound conflict mineral and it changes the geopolitical

4:53landscape of the entire Earth and becomes extremely militarized because of how powerful and Precious Precious it is so you play as one of the extraction operators effectively operating on your own being hired by people to go in get Sigma and and bring it out of course you know you're looting and shooting all along the way wow thank you so much John for explaining that because I I just

5:18feel like it adds so much more for me personally interest in the kind of extractions or the world you're set in versus just a battle royale where it's like I shoot you you shoot me you know it's just I'm just where are we here yeah exactly exactly and like that's super cool uh settings so I'm personally very excited about it and I want to talk a little bit about you know the

5:40development I know your team has been going through this for what multiple years you know we've had you and your team on the show multiple times now and you're getting closer and closer to the next stages can you talk about developing the game and how developing shrapnel has been different from games in the past you know whether it's just the web 3 aspect

6:00or the community involvement and actually seeing what the community wants as you're building it out yeah you know it's a you know when we first talked and certainly we found that the company were six people uh internally or about 70 now almost 70 um and if you include external kind of partner development we're probably closer to like 150 or something like

6:22that so you know we're definitely a full kind of production throttle right now um in terms of the differences I would say the similarities are just the game development part right most of our studio um or I would say a good chunk maybe 75 of the studio come from veteran game development we've all you know I've been doing almost 20 years A lot of people

6:44are in that exact same boat some even longer um so we understand that to make something quality you have to throw it in there not be married to it you got to play with it see what works see what doesn't it's not until you feel it that you know if it's really going to work or what parts are going to work and what needs to be modified along the way to

7:02actually like achieve the feeling and the magic that you want so you know that part of it is the same as what you would do in any other game to find the fun make it a sticky game um uh you know in all of those pieces certainly the other 25 of that is our blockchain team and we've been extremely lucky to get some top blockchain development Talent right Mark Mercury

7:26who's kind of the head of our entire platform side of our organization comes from consensus and before that he was the head of blockchain for Microsoft so he completely changed our entire landscape of what we thought we were going to do right we were very much starting to partner with all these different platforms and Technologies and we you know he came in and was like oh

7:48no we can do that plus all of these other things and by the way you know similar to how kind of epic games made Unreal Engine to make Unreal Tournament we're going to build a platform to make shrapnel that then we can make it you know as many games as we want uh and you know to the point where we even kind of getting the attention and starting to interact with other game studios who

8:09want to use our technology so it's been it's been a journey of doing what you think you know knowing what you need to do doing what you think you can and then that like usually um you have to reel back this has been one of those glorious cases where we just like shot to the Moon uh for what our expect stations were on kind of the blockchain side wow that's super cool

8:35great to have an experienced team and I did see some recent news about a game Bridge web 3 developer platform is that what you're talking about where you can make I don't know mini games or you could build anything that's sort of within the shrapnel ecosystem yeah it's not just shrapnel ecosystem so um that is game Bridge is exactly what I'm talking about it allows you you know

8:56the best way to describe it I would say is if you're familiar with something like Xbox Live or playfab for for game developers that'll make sense which is these are these um platforms that allow you to accomplish things very quickly in a very familiar way for game developers right so we we think about how we think about the itemization in the game how it gets

9:17reflected on a back-end service what player Services look like you know accounts uh you know monetization inventory those sorts of things all have these kind of back-end platform service support to them so uh it's basically like what if you had that with a blockchain potential to it it doesn't all have to be blockchain right but parts of it can be blocked in we built

9:40it in a way where it's extremely malleable depending on the partners you want to use the individual you know technology Partners parts that you want to to build your own it sort of allows you to mix and match and plug things together based on how the tech tech stack and the Tech players work so really it's it's much more like uh and a lot to the point where a bunch of the

10:01proof of Concepts that we've done for other games even internally as we're going through the process have nothing to do with a shrapnel type of game right we're taking like a um like an island Builder or you know you know almost like a um like a fashion customization game like these sorts of things that could be on mobile could be far more casual et

10:21cetera just so that they were proof of concept use cases that used our Tech stack and kind of show that yep it works for that like let's make sure this isn't just for shrapnel even though that's what our laser focus is right now that it is malleable for you know all of these other use cases that's super interesting um and I'm curious on how that came

10:42about because as you're developing shrapnel obviously you need some kind of engine to build everything out and like it's a whole nother shift in the mindset when you try to incorporate web 3 and sort of build the building blocks of the game you realize that you needed to build the the game Bridge to sort of build shrapnel and then you're like hey this is a whole nother business model in

11:01itself and we can expand this out to the future of gaming or you know yeah was that always in the mindset of like we're going to build an engine and the game it was definitely not initially in our mindset we were 100 focused on shrapnel um just as a game and an experience the world the gameplay you know the like user generated tools and the market and

11:23everything um this kind of uh was a result again of of getting very lucky with the talent that we were able to attract and just completely changing our altitude of what we could do um uh with with not not just like very little tax like almost very like almost no tax on the actual development of shrapnel just a natural evolution of having extremely uh talented senior

11:49people who think that way right and just architected it that way from the get-go wow no that's incredible I'm really looking forward to to seeing that because it really opens up into more of a platform play that you know some of the biggest games in the world uh like Minecraft and these things where they actually have that customizability or people are able to sort of create their

12:09own from the the inner workings of what that game what came out of shrapnel I'm excited to see that um and I want to jump into the blockchain web3 part a little bit more on on the shrapnel game uh I'm guessing that you know all the items are nfts and and potentially you can take them out of the game and trade them in real world or you know how exactly do you see the best

12:33part of the functionality in enhancing the experience of being entrapnel yeah I mean you know you nailed a lot of it right there which is the digital ownership and and of course that um has a different strata of what the different um you know nft types are uh to like stay in the blockchain vernacular you know we're very careful it's like my brain short circuits a little

12:55um when I'm talking about um shrapnel product stuff to the players and and you know the community we use completely different verbiage right we're trying to steer away from like the technical underpinnings of things and just talk about what it means to people um but like certainly in that space thinking about it internally we've got weapons and equipment and then of course

13:15we have all the stuff that you can customize as a user as a player skins insignias you know the maps themselves and those kind of have different um amounts of you know what's the best way to put it like fungibility effectively right like there's lots of weapons and equipment in the game that stuff comes from us um of course you own like everything but

13:37of course the stuff that you make you actually own the IP for as well right you're giving shrapnel license to use it in the game but it's not just yours like a a gun is that you loot in the game uh and then but we actually own the IP because we made it um you know the stuff that you make is actually um your IP so there's there is we're being very careful with the

14:02differentiation between all of those pieces um and and making it so like it's as meaningful as possible because that's really what all this is about right like there's a fundamental um layer that blockchain enables these transactions ownership Etc uh making it like genuinely meaningful from a human perspective and an ownership perspective is you know a lot of what our Focus On

14:25Target is yeah that's beautiful I I think people will really love that and you know people don't really think about it too much because I'm guessing you know you're not trying to make it too overly complicated on this is for you know the gaming industry is so much bigger than the blockchain industry and it's a great advancement to add value to the game but it shouldn't be the main

14:46focus obviously the game and the game play should be the main focus I'm curious on how you sort of manage all that you know I'm guessing it's all in the back end maybe people will see that they have a wallet or they're able to sort of move items out into a Marketplace but really keeping the the feel of like you're playing the game not to distract like you're opening your

15:06bank account on the side and doing different things that's distract you for actually the actual gameplay yeah yeah it's in game development we're all about eliminating friction whenever possible Right like there are times you introduce purposeful friction right time barrier or something et cetera but they need to be um purposeful for the actual gameplay

15:28you're trying to achieve they shouldn't be uh um you know having a non like linking a non-custodial wall if you don't care about that sort of thing like yeah to that vein um and this is part of Cambridge as well which is having a custodial wallet um behind an account having an account service is all like a very familiar territory for a shrapnel player when

15:49they jump in they're just creating account like grabbing you know the the executable downloading it jumping in and then shooting people right and getting in and like looting stuff as quickly as humanly possible all of that other stuff they don't have to worry about now as as the affordances increase as you're looking to engage more with the ecosystem then there starts to be you

16:11know you know kind of like more policy walls like regulatory walls because these are genuine digital assets right they have actual ownership it's not some service based wall like most companies have there are implications if you you know you're suddenly like making stuff your prolific Creator and you know you've got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets like there are

16:33ownership and tax implications and everything around that and at that point we have to have um stronger kind of regulatory walls around what people can do knowing who they are um for all of the like obvious legal reasons but for a lot of people like they're never going to encounter any of that right they're just they're going to hop in they're going to play the game uh

16:53and we try you know we have a a number of personas uh that we've kind of broken out of these are the people who are involved in the trapnel ecosystem and we try to make sure that we account for all of them every step of like not just the game but how they engage with the marketplace and the Creator tools and everything very cool Don and the last time that you

17:15were on the show it was around the end of 2022 beginning of 2023 and that's around the time when the the trailer for shrapnel was coming out I'm curious you know post that interview can you talk about the the feedback that the on growing Community from shrapnel saw in the trailer and then you know how did you guys take that moving forward and after that what have you guys sort of

17:39done since then leading up to now yeah for sure um so following that trailer we actually had a playable at GDC at the game developers conference um with a ton of people that came by um it was it was a little bit private it was you know invite only uh we thought you never know what those sorts of things how much interest um you're gonna get uh it was a hundred percent booked

18:02from like Monday to Friday through the entire thing uh and then it ended up being standing room only like of course you add ad hoc people people hear about it and it started becoming this thing where we were in you know you're in elevators or walking down the street and of course we're all in shrapnel swag the entire time and we'd start having just random people notice us we're like

18:24shrapnel I've been hearing about it at the show and yada yada can I come check it out and play um so it went from you never know how those things are going to turn out until we sort of ended up as this like playable gem at the show to a certain degree so then we took um that build and improved it a bit you know this is a show curated build it was something that

18:44can be effectively played in about 10 minutes simplify everything so that people can actually pick up and have fun a lot of times we did end up having people play multiple sessions some of the groups were like really into it and screaming and yelling by the end um so we took that a slightly improved version of that bill to consensus because it was open show floor situation

19:04so now no longer invite only now anybody who's at the show can walk up and play got a lot of great feedback a lot of great comments um uh based on that experience and that's a completely different audience right like half of those people are like is this Halo what am I looking at here yeah um so it was great to get this overwhelmingly positive feedback kind of and and to

19:27watch people play and get this proof positive the pig the game we know that we've been designing and playing in private really here at the studio is actually something that's gonna sing so of course at the same time as we're doing that we're in parallel development with the like the core games or the full feature Set uh all of the systems much bigger map spaces like that sort of

19:48stuff um and that's kind of like takes us to today where we're at um from kind of the release of that trailer to how we're now teeing up to effectively get people into Early Access at the end of this year um so that when you can actually you know download the game and there's going to be like different announcements about how people can get into Early Access

20:07aside from kind of our operator holders and stuff like that who are already in that Circle um but you know to get people to start playing that full game and uh um over you know the course of the following months to basically slowly roll it out uh to the community increased features increase the the audience um over time they actually get in and do it

20:28responsibly oh that's incredible to hear whenever you're the talk of the conference that's it's usually a very good sign um and I I've seen the online communities for shrapnel I know that they've been raving about it so I'm not surprised that it was a hit at at in person as well I'm definitely looking forward to waiting for that part when I'm able to play uh the Early Access for

20:49it as well with the community and I know you guys have had like Fanatics for like years now and I'm sure that you know just as at the conference people hear about it they see this video and they're like I want to make sure that I have access to check it out and get the early perks and stuff where's the main place where the major fans are right now and then is there

21:11ways for them to get involved or you know make sure that they don't miss out on the steps leading up to that access yeah I mean Discord is the best place for um to the second communication for sure right we're very active on Twitter as well our website is is um migrating from what I would say an informational site to a major like action Hub or the actual shrapnel as an

21:37ecosystem so you know stuff that's on there already like our Insignia tool where you can go on if as long as you have an account you can get in there and actually start like playing with the Insignia editor and creating your own brand and we've had a ton of community like amazing stuff that people have created that just blows my mind of what they've been able to do with our tools

21:57thus far so you know that is going to be the primary Hub where people go in and do that sort of thing engage in the marketplace um like find out what the actual like latest news and Community stuff is Discord is still to the second our entire team's in there not just you know not just like our marcom team and kind of like PR and Discord teams where entire studio is basically in Discord so

22:21that's where we're having much more lively to the second involved conversations with the community and especially like you said there's been some people who are um are just like super excited from the very beginning and we like we try to you know give them a spotlight and certainly like take a lot of their feedback um very closely to heart because it's

22:40not just kind of a Whimsical sweep through like these people have been paying close attention to what we've been doing and their feedback's usually like very good and on point that's great to hear I can leave the link to to the Discord and uh and the site as it gets updated and the player in the notes below as well I really appreciate taking the time Don out of the busy schedule

23:02and building shrapnel in the future of web3 gaming it's super exciting I'm going to be following along let's definitely follow up you know just before that early access release so that we can you know talk about the release and and make sure that all of our viewers don't miss playing it on day one as well because I'm super excited I know they probably are as well yeah for sure

23:22and I mean we'll be even before that early access release we'll have you know we have call signs already we'll be launching our Marketplace uh people with the Insignia will be able to publish to like blockchain publish their actual insignias for like ownership trading and equipping so we have like a ton of um uh you know product beats effectively leading up to that early access by the

23:45time we get to that point people will have been in there like playing with a bunch of stuff already so it's going to be a very full next set of months that you know lead to the holiday time frame amazing well thank you so much for the time Don all the best with shrapnel moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks Ashton foreign