Clint Bundrick discusses the Web3 game Shrapnel

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Clint bundrick the creative director of shrapnel Clint welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you so much for having me it's really nice to meet you Ashton you're very welcome I'm excited to dive into shrapnel you know one of these web 3

0:20games is like it looks like one of the best ones that's coming out I've seen some of the trailers and I'm excited to dive into your insights into it as the creative director I would love to start off our conversation with just hearing a little bit about your background in gaming and how that led up to getting into shrapnel and then we'll dive into the game

0:38yeah so I'm actually relatively new to the web 3 space I've spent more than 20 years making AAA games actually half my life at this point which is a crazy thing to say out loud you know I started when I was 19 working at Microsoft and shipped the original Xbox and since then have worked on you know everything from BioShock Infinite Red Faction

1:02gorilla to Saints Row you know many many titles over the last 20 years and so I joined shrapnel I guess have you tried to remember what date it does it's probably about eight nine months ago and was just really excited about the technology the team the way shrapnel was approaching it that we are very much a game first studio

1:27And so that was all about kind of What attracted me to come and try to build a AAA game team to go make a triple A game on the blockchain amazing and you know for the people who haven't heard of shrapnel and they're in there's a lot of people interested in blockchain based games and a lot of them have been sort of I don't know either lacking on the graphics or the gameplay

1:48and I feel like shrapnel is one that's like sparing nothing so let's get you know your pitch on what is shrapnel for those who haven't heard of it absolutely so shrapnel is a tactical extraction shooter it takes place in a world where a massive ass asteroid has collided with the Moon that has created massive debris that Rains Down on the earth it scars the Earth in this 500

2:12kilometer wide band that goes all the way around the planet the idea is that in our world this whole area became very dangerous it was subject to constant meteor showers so the whole thing got walled off everyone got moved outside of it and the space within that wall became known as the sacrifice Zone but over time there's a discovery this mysterious

2:35compound called Sigma that turns out to be incredibly valuable and the world does what it does which is different pmcs and what we call mefs mercenary extraction forces kind of descend into the extraction and into the sacrifice Zone in order to collect this Sigma and extract it and sell it to the highest bidder so the player plays as an elite operator they're going to venture into

2:57this sacrifice Zone with other players they're going to build their play style out of the gear that they collect or find or extract from The Zone and they are going to collect as much stigma as they can and try to get out with it or die try and the idea is because it's an extraction shooter everything that's on the player is at risk so when you die you drop everything so it is really this

3:19high stakes game in many ways like our emotional core the way we think about the game it's the ultimate high-stakes treasure hunt we want it to feel that way we want it to feel like when the players in the sacrifice Zone and they see this meteor media meteor shower on the horizon they know that is now populated that area with valuable Sigma but the drop ship just arrived and they

3:41want to put them in these really difficult positions where they're like all right I've got some gear I've collected a weapon I'd never seen before am I going to head back to that drop ship get out count my winnings go create a new play style and go in again or am I going to risk it a little bit more go a little bit deeper into the sacrifice Zone go to the location of that meteor

3:59shower collect more Sigma and try to get out on the next drop ship those are just some of the ways we kind of think about the game and the idea that really is this high-stakes treasure hunting experience I think the other piece of it is that it is built on a platform that's all about kind of empowering creators we want players to come build the next great

4:19multiplayer map we want players to build and create the next great weapon skin and the Next Great Character item it's all about this kind of unprecedented kind of Creator culture built around shrapnel so that players are actually building the items that they want and then anything that they build they own wow such an incredible explanation of

4:41the game it's probably the best most exciting explanation of a game I've ever heard so and I've seen the trailers and you know one of them the multiplayer trailer just came out this morning and this looks like you know this is no easy feat to create a game like this right and these games from what I understand have a big budget huge team it's not an

5:04overnight process it's like a really long process to build a game and even after it's released you know as you mentioned about engaging the community and helping them build sort of shape the future of the game beyond that it never really ends so how long you mentioned you joined nine months ago is the project sort of started then and you know how what does

5:24the timeline sort of look like of where this game's at right now so yeah so I mean we are I mean you've seen a lot of stuff right so we have that initial trailer that was built in unreal five so that's actually an environment we can run around in and that was all about kind of telling a bit of that story I just told right in that trailer you can see the

5:43operators chasing that piece of Sigma their other operators kind of descending on them trying to get it from them they're trying to get the drop ship and get out so that was kind of that initial trailer the gameplay that came out this morning is really kind of an early experiment I mean in many ways this is what's fascinating to me about the web 3 space but hands up it's also what

6:02terrifies me I'm from the web 2 world right where we work on a game for years in total silence the process is a black box we don't share anything you know you work on it for two years a CG trailer comes out you cross your fingers that people like it a year later you release gameplay you cross your fingers people like it and then you release it you know

6:23you know a year after that and you hope that it finds the audience and that people really get what you were trying to deliver but it is this very kind of closed ecosystem the interesting thing for us is kind of you know doing this alongside a very engaged Community who has a voice as we're doing this they are checking out early concept art and

6:43you know we just finished this series on Discord with the community that I was calling the vision Series where we actually walked the community Through each of the major pillars of the game why we have that what that creative process looks like what those pillars are and got feedback from the community things that would have never happened in

7:00the web 2 space it would have never been allowed to happen because it's all kept so close to the vest and kept this giant secret so that's really kind of a fascinating part of it and so as we've been bringing that Community along the journey now we've released the gameplay today this is a really kind of early experiment of us playing around in

7:19that environment from the trailer and like I said it's so it's so much earlier than I would I would usually show people things like it's just from from my previous life making web 2 we would have never let that be seen outside the studio and so it's exciting but it's also terrifying and so on the side we are you know continuing to hurtle towards kind of

7:40a true first playable getting our core systems in place really testing out those those pillars like I said that we walk through with the community so we are still you know pretty pretty early on but we're expecting to be you know first playable in the near future and you know I think you know this again and the interesting thing about the web 3 world is letting the community play it

7:59much earlier and see much more of it than ever would have happened in the web 2 space yeah it's definitely a paradigm shift from the old ways but I feel like it's it's great and like you know I more people hear about it more people you know get involved and yeah you do get early feedback and you know not everyone's gonna like everything but

8:21I'm way more excited about it because I've heard a lot more about it than some of these other games that you know only the hardcore piece people they sort of they see the trailer and they're still thinking about it for like a year people often forget you know especially in web3 and crypto things are moving so quickly that if you don't have

8:39those touch points as you continue to go and people just forget about you know what was the news last month they just totally forget and so I feel like it's a good thing absolutely I know that you guys already have like a large community you know pre-game in Discord and the other channels you're talking about talking about the pillars of the game maybe you could touch on

9:01sort of a synopsis of what you explained to the community on that front yeah yeah so I mean we walked the community through our kind of creative process different Studios do this different ways I like to think of it as kind of an emotional core and that's that where the ultimate high-stakes treasure hunting experience that's how it's supposed to feel to the player when they're

9:20venturing into the Zone when they're making those hard choices then the rest of the pillars are a lot about trying to figure out like where are we going to place our big bets how do we give ourselves a shared language internally so that when we're deciding we're going to do this feature or this feature how do we do that you kind of create razors using these statements so our first

9:38pillar is what we think of as every session tells a story and I think a lot of times when people hear me say something like that they think cutscenes or vo they think you know scripts they think traditional stories but for me what I look at with something like that is the stories that players create I think when you look at what gets streamed on Twitch and the games that

9:57people talk about the rise of Battle Royale games for example these are all games that are about giving the player agency and making it feel like every session Anything could happen I always joke that you know a really good session of Pub G plays like a horror game because you might be you know rooting through a building and then suddenly a vehicle pulls up outside and everybody

10:16gets dead silent so for us that kind of every session tells a story is about how all these Dynamic elements come together the meteor showers the sigma storms I was talking about the drop ship locations the you know a persistent injury model so that an encounter early in the game may actually have a lasting effect and change the way the player behaves the rest of the session it's all

10:39about giving the player agency and mixing with all these Dynamic elements so that every session feels you know completely unique our other our next pillar was what we call our 70 30 rule we are very much a tactical shooter I always think of it as brains before bullets I think in a game where everything that's on the player is at risk we don't want players feeling like

11:00they're throwing their corpse at one another those games exist and I love those games but that's not what we're making we want it to be that the player is actually thinking about what they're doing they're thinking tactically they're thinking about what they're trying to get out of session they're again they're making hard choices about what they're willing to risk so that 70

11:1630 rule is a bit of that but it's also that 70 mil Sim 30 future Tech we think about it as you know when you look at like railguns exist right now but they're roughly the size of houses 50 60 years from now where this game takes place maybe it fits in a backpack that might be a technology that we would actually support we do want to feel like it's it's grounded in reality our next

11:39one is expression meets Mastery so this was all about how we allow the player to create the character that they want create the items the aesthetic that they want but also the play style if you want to play as somebody who plays what we call infosec which is somebody who's basically weaponizing information providing that to their team helping the

11:58team make better decisions as they're going so they know where the drop ships are coming they know when the sigma storms are coming in then they can do that but it's really about decoupling those we don't want to have player to be able to we don't want the player to have to choose between how they want to look and how they want to play so we think of

12:14as expression meets Mastery our fourth pillar is what we call sound as a weapon this is all about how we make audio and situational awareness a really dominant skill in shrapnel that's everything from gear that you can bring in an enhanced microphone that turns the volume up in the world around you so you can use it to triangulate enemies it's about how

12:35everything you interact with in the world has some sound result you know did you open that door slowly or did you kick that door open that's going to have a very different impact on the audio and that's going to give information to players around you and then our last one is what we call free to play 2.0 so this for me is kind of how I think a bit about web 3 space bringing web 2 people

12:57into it creating a large community I think for players they have to just think of this as kind of this is like the next rev of free to play and if you don't know absolutely everything about web 3 and you've never made a wallet there's still a reason for you to come and play shrapnel there's still a place for you to come and play so that you can be exposed to those things over time or

13:17if you just want to come and play it's a game that's what you can do so that's also about making sure players feel like they always get value out of the session whether it's they made a little progress towards their weekly Quest or they started leveling up their character it's just that sense of progression but also again just kind of how we think about

13:33lowering the barriers to entry particularly you know in the web 3 world and just making sure that there's always a place for people to come and play so that's a really like you know eight nine minute like synopsis of our five core pillars happy to answer any questions about that but we basically spend about an hour on each of those with the Discord Community going really

13:55deep and that'll be a series that we kind of continue in the future wow incredible and I'll make sure that the Discord is also linked in the description to get people you know involved in that you know in the near future here but it seems like there's just so much that goes into the game and the intricacies you know whether you talk about you know the sound you

14:15know opening the door slowly or quickly and the expression I feel like when I think of you know the infosec it's like you think of shooter it's like oh you're just shooting it's like no no there's way more involved than that and when you talk about the expression part and how you want to express it and play the game and your character I sort of tie that into to the

14:39web three aspect of it and you know how people are able to express themselves through whether it's nfts or blockchain and more importantly out like own their own expression and I'm curious if you know you have any slight insights into how the web3 aspect sort of allows that in are all of the items nfts or you know do people own their characters and

15:05and how does that sort of function for the people that you know they're playing the game and they get excited and now sudden they hear about the web 3 aspect of it maybe you can talk about that a little bit absolutely so yeah so when we think about those items that you're bringing into the sacrifice Zone your weapons your gear all the stuff that defines your play style all of those are

15:25nfts and so you own them but they are at risk going into the sacrifice zone so that's where that kind of high-stakes treasure hunting experience but it means that you and I could be in a session and you know you kill me I drop all of my stuff you quickly go over and you're looting through my body and you see this like you know tier three weapon you've

15:45never seen before now you've collected it and if you can get out of the session and extract it now you own it so that is that kind of high stakes feel so that's the kind of player side on the Creator side we really think of it as kind of create to own so that if you build the next great multiplayer map of course you own it if you build the next great weapon skin or

16:09the next character item you own it you can mint it you can you know put it on the marketplace you can you know you can be creators in this space in many ways the way I think about it is I love the idea of kind of players becoming known within communities but I particularly like the idea of creators being known within the community you know I think in an Ideal

16:33World what I imagine you know a couple of years from now is that we see these players who like we know the names of those who build the Great shrapnel maps and there's all this anticipation about when this new this new creators map is coming out next week or this idea that players can kind of build up their their own reputation their own you know kind of prominence

16:54within within the world of shrapnel because everything they create they get to own so that's really kind of how I think about it you know nfts on the player side that high stakes treasure hunting experience but then also this feeling of anything I build I own forever and then I can do whatever I want with it I can keep it for myself I can put it on the market place like all

17:16of those things are wrapped in and around the kind of core goals of shrapnel that's very exciting and I feel like it totally makes sense you know if for example like something like ninja or like these live streamers they get so popular they're more of a household name than the game itself and if they have the ability to create a new map you know everyone's going to want to be playing

17:37that and on top of that I have seen some web3 sort of metaverse or nft experiences where people were able to buy part of like F1 Grand Prix track and they sort of own it outright and if people are playing the game you know because they own that nft they're sort of getting royalties on it or like they're a part of the creators of the game and I feel like you know with

18:02shrapnel to be able to create new maps or you know be a part of the creation of the game I feel like that just it almost was like handing off your community to the Dow or to you know making it more of a web free decentralized game where you know once the community loves parts of the game they continue to expand on those parts and like and that's what goes goes back

18:23to what I said about the expression and sort of creating the way that you play the game is like not only do you just create the way that you play your character you actually created the map that you're playing on exactly and I do think that generates this sense of ownership and connection that I don't think we see in other games right I think the idea

18:43that if you build that next great multiplayer map and that's where everybody's playing like yeah you should be compensated accordingly but I also just love the idea of players feeling like no I kind of I belong here I'm connected to this I own a portion of this I have a voice in where it goes that is a particularly exciting element of this as I start to project into the

19:06future you know and obviously we are kind of in the early stages of that overall and figuring out what that means and what's going to work and you know the nature of making games like any great game is made through iteration right like I always say we don't ship ideas we ship experiences because ideas basically aren't code you can actually

19:27go make it and particularly with games like you said where all these different things are colliding I always think of games as this weird they're a result of a collision between like technology and art and the Collision is always unpredictable so when I think about you know great games being made through iteration I think the same way about Community I think the same way about

19:46ownership I think that we are on a journey and kind of getting to bring a community along with it of figuring out like what does this mean what are the tools we actually need you know we have our kind of early hypothesis and we're obviously like building the game and you've seen all the stuff we're making tremendous progress there but part of what gets me really excited is

20:05this does feel like like Uncharted Territory in many ways it's a totally new space and that is very exciting for somebody like me who's you know spent half their life making making games the idea of getting to do something completely new and be frankly a little scared again which is usually like that's always how I think about it like if I'm a little

20:27bit scared it's probably the right thing like I when I was working on Red Faction gorilla when I first saw the destruct production technology and the building collapse and all of that I went oh my I don't know how I'm going to build maps that the player could destroy everything like I'm a little terrified I'm in and that's kind of how I felt looking

20:43over at the web 3 space and that's kind of That's What attracted me to shrapnel the idea of some do something completely new and really kind of buck the trends of how I'd made games in the past yeah it's very exciting and you know I feel like there's a lot of people in web 3 that are like me that you know in the 2000s they played Games

21:04Hardcore and then there was something about those like in-game currencies that sort of attracted them to joining cryptocurrency and getting into finance and now they're deep in web 3 and then they see those two worlds colliding of web 3 with gaming and they're like oh The Nostalgia and I can still work with the cryptos it's like The Best of Both Worlds so it's very exciting

21:25And I think this is going to revolutionize and change what people see blockchain games as because right now you know sort of metaverse sources and games they're sort of early stage very early stage and into what they will be and this is definitely taking it to the next level so Clint what are sort of the next steps and you sort of hinted at

21:45you're doing more discussions in the Discord I'm definitely going to put the link to the trailer and the multiplayer action in the description but it's sort of the road map of you know what's coming in the next quarter and into 2023 if you have any hints on what's happening on the way to the game launch yeah so I mean we are kind of running

22:08towards a true kind of first playable I don't want to put a date on that but I think that a lot of that will be will be revealed very soon and so yeah I think a lot of what we're going to be looking at over the next period of time is showing more of the game continuing that series with the Discord Community and really you know getting the

22:30getting the game in players hands much sooner than they would anticipate I think from a traditional game development so those are all the things that I'm kind of looking forward to like you said that kind of early feedback alongside an Engaged Community like that's always at the center of what we're doing so those are some of our next beats kind of over the next you

22:50know six to nine months awesome well I'm really looking forward to it I will leave the link to the website the trailers and the Discord and the socials in the description box below thank you so much Clint for all the insights into this and for making web3 gaming a better place I'm really looking forward to shrapnel coming out and all the best in

23:12the near future thank you so much Ashton appreciate it