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Hey @channel, please join me in welcoming our next AMA guest, Don Norbury.
Don Norbury is Head of Studio at , the first blockchain-enabled moddable FPS game. From the genre-defining franchises of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sunset Overdrive, and Crackdown, to the sports superstars Madden NFL and NASCAR, Don has redefined creative boundaries across platforms and player experience for over a decade.
You can ask him anything about:
Hey Jack Boreham - thanks for having me! Always a pleasure to share the story and vision for Shrapnel with curious minds.
My story started back in the late 80's with a game called Think Quick that let you build your own maps and puzzles - but it wouldn't be until much later after studying computing in college that I would formalize that creative desire into a career and landed at EA Tiburon working on Madden NFL and starting my interest in gameplay and A.I. systems. I had been building my own game campaign using the Neverwinter Nights toolset at the time and they were apparently impressed enough to let me in the door. Over the following 17 years I moved across the industry from building teams and studios and into Publishing leadership.
After sports games at EA I moved to film franchises at Lucasarts working on Indiana Jones and Star Wars primarily focused on A.I.... then built the team and architecture from the ground-up for Bioshock Infinite (I think I was team member #6 or so for that project) at Irrational Games in Boston.
I spent the following 6 years in Global Publishing at Xbox within Microsoft - which was a fantastic way to gain business acumen and learn to juggle multiple titles. I was the lead for Sunset Overdrive and Crackdown 3 - but also assisted where necessary on titles like Ryse, Quantum Break, and Age of Empires.
Finally - life somehow put me in front of some very talented people from HBO's Interactive and Immersive Experiences team - which is where I met and worked with the people who are now the founders of NEON. We did both publishing and R&D in that organization - and when AT&T acquired Warner Media we started planning our exit and what we were going to do next.
We had the genius timing of founding NEON right before the pandemic - but as you can see: our amazing team held to that challenge. We did some virtual production work and had working products from HBO on the slate - and about a year ago was the inception of what is now the Shrapnel studio and project.
We have a ton going on right now - primarily focused on delivering the phases outlined in the Roadmap on the site and in the whitepaper.
The team is operating in distinct swimlanes with crossovers that are: Game, Platform, Economy, Marcom, Experience, Creator Tools, and Partnerships.
There are non-player enemies. We're currently playing with the scope of these. I spent about 6 years as an A.I. lead in gaming so I have... opinions. 😆 But ultimately the call on the initial form of these combatants and how they evolve over time will be determined by our game team and production. We're actually talking with a couple behavior capture companies that can essentially enable something like "drivatars" but for shooter NPCs so we can enable extremely believable A.I. combatants with player capabilities. But ultimately - IMO - most of the really interesting A.I. is crafted entirely for the player experience (as part of the experience instead of just something like a player) with movement, abilities, etc. that are unique and interesting.
Fractal and - I think I can answer both your lines of questioning at the same time (if I'm interpreting properly). Our team comes from a transmedia background - so we're deeply involved in world, story, and character building across all available forms of media from the very beginning of the project.
We've laid out the kernel of Shrapnel to the community on the site and in the whitepaper - but there is obviously much more story to tell (and the community will eventually become an enormous part of that story). The comics series tells the stories of 5 individual characters from different parts of the world around the time-frame of the actual Shrapnel lunar impact event from their perspectives and intertwined with their own personal drama.
The Operators NFT series is tied to the comics - with each character represented as a limited-run series to be released with a bundle of utility related to community, the game, and the comics themselves. The exact details around release timing and cadence will be revealed soon!
This is super cool and I'm loving the art design. I'm very much into FPS games.
I'm a fan of the bioshock series so I just have to ask: what was it like working on Bioshock Infinite?
What lessons do you take from your time on such projects that have helped you with developing Shrapnel?
Limarc Ambalina Thanks for the kind words! My time on Bioshock was formative in every way imaginable - creative and production process, architectural challenges, team building, etc. I could probably dedicate an AMA itself to the journey through that project. I'll talk about one creative (and team) element and one technical element.
I would say I learned that a successful creative process involves continuously questioning your own vision and quality bar, destroying what you made, and rebuilding it again. If you read anything about the Pixar process you'll see something similar there. We built that game 10 times over again - and as a result the tools and process had to be very slick to accommodate rapid iteration. Also you learn to pivot quickly... identifying which ideas are precious and which are tertiary (that you maybe though were critical) and leave your ego out of it. I learned how to do this myself and then how to guide others through that journey. As an example: we had an entire amazing PvE multiplayer mode that we had to cut to ensure single-player shipped. Going through that process personally (and quickly) and then supporting others through that same adventure was an enormous growing experience for me.
From a technical perspective, I learned that you only get to make about one big technical bet per year. You make tons over the course of the project - but only one BIG one - so you better make sure it's an absolute PILLAR for the game. For Bioshock Infinite, the first big bet was the floating world's technology. On the generation of console hardware we were developing for - you couldn't have giant pieces of moving geometry with gameplay on them (i.e. - needing to be physics integrated, have gameplay logic, etc.). So we basically built a system where everything was actually static and the movement transforms handled separately. On the rendering side that transform was applied and then there were hooks into gameplay and A.I. logic that allowed the rest of the game to understand what was "happening" movement wise. We extended the coordinate/vector/etc. system in the game so instead of (X,Y,Z) you had (X,Y,Z,R) - where R was the "frame of reference" you were in (the floating island or attack ship/barge or whatever). It was technically clever - but took about 6 months to implement and then tons of fallout bugs afterwards. Obviously: this was a PILLAR for the game and in retrospect completely worth it and the right call for that year's big bet.