Who needs another shooter?
While the $11.6 billion battle royale market may be saturated, Don Norbury, co-founder of blockchain-based rescue shooter Shrapnel, believes there is still plenty of room for differentiation in this growing category, where players compete to survive in harsh environments and reach a specific destination to advance or win.
Shrapnel’s core gameplay is intense Player vs. Player vs. Environment (PvPvE) matches, where players can collect Sigma, an in-game resource, to enhance their damage output and resistances and continue fighting instead of staying in the safe zone.
“We developed the game with the intention that every play session of Shrapnel will tell a story,” explains Norbury, CTO and studio head at Neon Machine (developer of Shrapnel). “The gameplay is designed to create an incredibly satisfying feeling that keeps you addicted to first-person shooters, but the experience is further enhanced by the narrative shaped by the player’s decisions in each match.”
Who put the pieces together to make Shrapnel?
Norbury has extensive experience in the gaming industry, having worked on a number of well-known games, including:
From 2005 to 2006, he developed AI systems for EA's NASCAR and Madden game series;
From 2006 to 2008, he led AI work on Indiana Jones and Star Wars at LucasArts;
While working at 2K Games from 2008 to 2012, he served as AI supervisor on BioShock;
led Xbox publishing efforts from 2012 to 2018, also serving as engineering lead on Crackdown 3 and Sunset Overdrive;
From 2019 to 2020, he led HBO’s interactive division, where he and his team won an Emmy Award for the Westworld gaming experience they produced.
At HBO, Norbury also worked closely with Neon Machine’s future co-founder and CEO Mark Long, who previously led the development of Microsoft’s xcloud and ran video game companies for more than 20 years.
After HBO was acquired by AT&T, Norbury and others eventually jumped ship to look for new opportunities. They joined forces to establish a new game studio called Neon Machine, which raised $10.5 million in November 2021 and another $20 million in October 2023.
“We were at the forefront of this, exploring virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, and speech synthesis, which inevitably led us to explore blockchain and Web3,” Norbury said. “We realized that it had the potential to create not just games, but entire stimulating virtual experiences that players could immerse themselves in.”
Finally, the Neon Machine team includes Creative Director Clint Bundrick, who shaped the game’s brand and advanced the concept of extraction shooters, and COO Aaron Nonis, who previously spearheaded the creation of the HBO Max streaming platform.
How does Shrapnel equip blockchain?
Shrapnel was one of the first AAA games developed on the Avalanche blockchain, though it did launch its first NFT series on Ethereum - Operators, which dropped in June 2022 and was released in waves for the five main characters in Shrapnel lore: Aniki, M, Hassan, Alek, and Alyxandra.
Owning an Operator brings various benefits to players, including early access to versions of the game as it's in development, a copy of the character's game companion comic book, allocations to future Drops, and more.
Customized looks for Shrapnel weapons are acquired via NFTs and can be bought or sold on the Shrapnel marketplace, which launches in March 2024. So far, Shrapnel has announced collaborations with NFT collections and web3 games such as BoDoggos, Neo Tokyo, Alchemy Gods, and SuperVerse.
“We want Shrapnel to be highly chainable, and rather than just trading weapon skins, our goal is to chain crafting materials so that crafting becomes a highly composable part of the game,” said Norbury.
Shrapnel also provides the community with an in-game identity generation engine called INSIGNIA, where players can create on-chain “callsigns” that have currently unspecified benefits and can be bought or sold on the Shrapnel marketplace.
“It can’t just be a sandbox,” Norbury said. “We’re building a universe that you want to be a part of and create your own place in, and that’s the idea behind letting players make their own callsigns on the blockchain so they can own and trade their Shrapnel identities.”
Under the hood, Shrapnel runs on Neon Machine’s proprietary blockchain infrastructure, called Mercury, which is currently connected to an Avalanche subnet with plans to migrate to a new environment called Hyper, so games don’t need to compete for block space and can scale more easily.
“As game developers, we’re used to flexible systems, but very rigid tooling and marketplaces,” Norbury explained. “Web3 is somewhere in between, where we’re essentially building a commerce layer for everything in the gaming world, which mirrors a lot of what we saw before blockchain.”
How to Play Shrapnel
Shrapnel has been rolled out in phases through a series of “Shrapnel Training Exercises” (STX for short), with the first public beta, STX1, launching in February 2024 alongside the game’s Early Access release on the Epic Games Store.
The first STX focused on building the core multiplayer gameplay process, and subsequent STX versions covered more elements such as the game token economy, collectible items, crafting, new maps, and more.
This flexibility has been critical to Shrapnel’s efforts to attract more users to its massive virtual world, with Norbury saying that more than 120,000 accounts were created in the first few months, with 80,000 of those accounts actively accessing the game during the STX beta phase.
Until now, only players who purchased the Extraction Pack and gained early access have been able to experience Shrapnel in staggered STX release phases, and while this has enabled focused testing and iteration, the game will need to exponentially increase its audience to successfully launch as free-to-play in early 2025.
Only time will tell if Neon Machine can fully deliver on that promise, but based on Shrapnel's progress so far, the game's developers are aiming big and won't be content with just Shrapnel.
Editor’s Note: This article was written in partnership with Shrapnel.
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