Phil Shenk is co-founder of Gravity Bear, a social games company founded in 2008. Shenk has worked as lead artist of Diablo 2 and was co-founder of Flagship Studios, makers of Hellgate: London. Ten Ton Hammer recently caught up with Phil Shenk to talk find out more about Gravity Bear's upcoming game Battle Punks and how the it will utilize Facebook to allow players to compete and form new relationships over the social network.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for chatting with us, Phil! Prior to WildTangent Gravity Bear, you were heavily involved with Hellgate: London, and while debate still rages over whether HG:L was or wasn't an MMOG, we understand that a number of folks at Gravity Bear have stocked their resumes and portfolios with MMOG projects in the past. Why choose to go after the social games space rather than create another MMOG?

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style="font-style: italic;">Battle Punks development is headed towards an asynchronous MMOG.

Phil Shenk: Thanks for the opportunity! I’m always kind of floored by how defined the term “social games” seems to be. People use the term social game to mean a very specific style of game that takes advantage of the specific way social networks are set up right now. The way games like Farmville and Pet Society are structured is a symptom of the rules social networks (Facebook primarily) impose on its viral channels. They’ve evolved in a very Darwinian sense to fill the market created by the Facebook structure.

Anyway, sorry to get sidetracked there, but it’s part of my answer. We didn’t set out to make a social game, we set out to make a game that could be born on social networks, and then grow to challenge the assumptions of what people have for games on social networks. The direction we’re headed with Battle Punks is towards an asynchronous MMOG. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Seriously though, I know a number of folks in our audience were big Mythos fans, and I know from your press release quote that you're trying to create those memorably fun gaming moments, which is just the sort of quote that got many folks believing in Mythos. So how much of your vision for Mythos were you able to weld into the design of Battle Punks?

Phil Shenk: Well, people might hate me for saying this, but the vision for Mythos was much simpler than what I want to do with Battle Punks, and any other games we make at Gravity Bear. Don’t get me wrong, Mythos was a great game even in beta, and would have been even better. It had huge potential. But at its core, it was based on the same model as other MMO’s.

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style="font-style: italic;">Battle Punks will use instancing to allow more control over how you play.

Now the one thing that did directly lead to some of the thinking for our games at Gravity Bear was the idea of instancing the world, so that players could have more control over when and how they play. I wanted to create events that happened specifically for you, and for your friends, based on what you were doing. One idea I had was if you were on a road from one area to the next, that road was instanced. We could know what level you were, what quests you were on, and who your friends were. From that, we could throw other players into that same instance, perhaps coming the other way, which would be meaningful to you. Maybe they had a quest to intercept whatever it was that you were on a quest to deliver. That kind of thinking led directly to what I want to do with our new asynchronous model of play.

Ten Ton Hammer: There's no denying that Facebook is immensely popular, but in the short history of web communities we've seen a few rise and fall. Choosing a web community as a platform for games development might be a tougher business decision than we might give you credit for. Was there a particular moment - a statistic or a news story - at which you knew it was the right time to hitch your wagon to Facebook, or was it a pretty gradual process?

Phil Shenk: Well here’s the thing. Facebook isn’t a web community. It’s a social network, which by definition is the web of connectedness you have to your community. Facebook is like email, or IM, or your contact list, just on steroids. It looks like its own community, but what you’re probably thinking about is a community that grows on its own, within the framework Facebook provides. There is a World of Warcraft community in Facebook that takes advantage of the framework and tools for communication. Farmville has spawned numerous sub-communities. Battle Punks has a community.

The big moment for me was when I first thought of Facebook as the world’s biggest game lobby. At the time, I was thinking of using it exactly as that--as a lobby for a more real-time game experience. But as we thought about it more, we saw a much, much bigger opportunity that only coincidentally works well on Facebook or any other social network. The big ah-ha moment was when we saw that tens of millions of people will play a game, mostly because they can spend any period of time on it.  

Ten Ton Hammer: A fully 3D game in a browser still seems like science fiction at a time when even Gmail and YouTube routinely stalls for me, but we're starting to see browser based 3D games trickle onto the gaming scene. You've been a pioneer on the 3D tech behind Battle Punks, so how fully 3D is it? Will we be playing in third-person, first-person, be able to jump and/or fly? Will damage I sustain in-game hurt me in real life? :)

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style="font-style: italic;">Battle Punks will use a robust 3D customization scheme.

Phil Shenk: You know, the biggest issue with 3D games in a browser is the same issue that 3D games have in general, and that’s system requirements. Gamers will have the easiest experience because their rigs easily run a modern 3D engine. The folks that have trouble are the ones with 8 year-old computers that somehow don’t have a video card, or have a full hard-drive, or buggy drivers. There aren’t many of them, but when you’re trying to reach that huge audience, there will be a significant percentage.

But to answer your question, we use 3D avatars with a pretty robust customization scheme. It’s the most customizable avatar system that I’ve personally worked with, and takes into account all the lessons I learned on Diablo, Hellgate, and Mythos. It’s very extendible and should let us do just about anything we want down the road. The environments are also full 3D, but the camera is set at a side-view perspective. The biggest barrier to casual users coming into 3D is the controls, so we made it super simple at this point. I’ll be honest, it’s a simple game right now, but it’s just the starting point. Hardcore gamers will enjoy it as a lightweight and fun diversion.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is the game solely focused on PvP battles with Facebook opponents? Is there a PvE-ish softer side of the game for people like me who are secretly afraid of some of the people they've friended?

Phil Shenk: It’s interesting, because while we are technically PvP, the interaction is fairly anonymous. The characters you fight function more as user-created content than actual players. Because it’s asynchronous, you are fighting their avatar in the state it was in when they last played. It’s more about trying to figure out that particular build than it is about beating that player. The feeling is more akin to PvE in that respect.

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Battle Punks is mainly a PvP game, but it has PvE battles and other PvE elements.

We also have explicit PvE matches, in the form of NPC mobs and bosses. Right now, these are randomly spawned along with the player-created characters. We’ll be doing more interesting things with them in the future, including multi-player boss-fights, tag-team matches, dungeons and quests.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you attempting to turn "core" MMOG players into Facebook gamers with Battle Punks? Is this the "gateway drug" that will get us to finally take Facebook games seriously, and if so, will they find a lot of familiar MMOG concepts - guilds, raids, PvE content, auctionhouse, etc. - in the game?

Phil Shenk: Well I hope I made it clear that as far as I’m concerned, we’re not making “Facebook games”. I’ll keep chanting that mantra until I’m buried. I do want to make an MMOG that you can play anywhere, at any time, and for any amount of time. It’s not going to require that you spend 5 hours a day and it certainly won’t require you get everyone together for the same 5 hours. Our ultimate goal is to bring many of the MMOG concepts that make them fun and engaging into an asynchronous model you can play pretty much all the time, during the day in little slices.

Ten Ton Hammer: One of the most addicting things about Facebook gaming, for me, hearkens back to the olden days of BBS gaming, when you got x number of action points to do however many things and then you were done for the day. Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville have that sort of limited session play down to a science, and people seem to love it as a quick gaming fix with guaranteed progress. Does Battle Punks find a way to capitalize on that mechanic, or is a different kind of Facebook game altogether?

Phil Shenk: Well, I’ll be honest, it’s an uphill battle trying to do something different on Facebook, because the framework really pushes developers to do things a certain way. In order to have your game spread, you need to make sure users are sharing the game, and that other users are reacting to those shares. To use a biological analogy, there is strong environmental pressure to evolve in a certain way. Since we are small, and trying to bootstrap our success, we have to start modestly, and make some concessions like using energy as a limiter. Once we get the ball rolling, and start making enough money to pay the bills, then we’ll shift into the next phase.

I think using energy and appointment-based mechanics are OK, but they aren’t necessarily fun in and of themselves. They give you a nice excuse to go do something else for awhile, but so does waiting for someone else to take a turn. It is a simplistic way to gate progress if you have only a limited amount of content. Lots of traditional games have things like this, but it’s not the only thing they have.

Ten Ton Hammer: How much of the game will interact with your Facebook profile? Will you, for example, be able to create a character based on your profile picture?

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style="font-style: italic;">Battle Punks will use Facebook to allow players to meet new people and build new relationships.

Phil Shenk: I really want to focus on you as an avatar in the world. One of the issues I see with Facebook games right now is that you are “you” and everyone knows it. In an MMOG, you get to be somebody different. You get to carve your own identity and that’s liberating for many people. When you meet someone in the game world, you’re not thinking about all their quirks and annoying traits, and likewise you’re not worried about your own. I think that’s one of the main building blocks of online MMOG communities… that you meet and get to know people based on their actions and words, not their superficial appearance. I want to provide that same concept in our games, so  you are building relationships beyond your friend network. Imagine that... a social game where you actually get to meet new people!

Ten Ton Hammer: Congrats on entering open beta in early March. In closing, how can players get involved with the game? Any newbie tips and tricks? And is there anything else you'd like a more hardcore MMOG community to know about the game?

Phil Shenk: You can get to it on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/battlepunks/.

To the hardcore MMOG community, if I could get one thing across it’s that there is huge potential for us MMOG players to create something truly different and groundbreaking. They used to say that MMOG’s would never break a million players worldwide, until WoW came along. Blizzard proved that you can make an accessible world that millions will play, many who never played a game in their lives. Now people say that the “Facebook” crowd will never play anything more complicated than a farming game. I think that’s insulting and absurd. I think the only issue is that most people simply don’t have the time to dedicate to a traditional MMOG. I know I no longer do!

What we’re doing is trying to bring that same level of experience to people in the time they have to play it, and in a form that is easy to access. It’s the core players that are helping us get there with their feedback and roots support. They are the ones that immediately “get” what we’re trying to do, and see the opportunity for the genre. Our most dedicated fans are the ones who play games, especially MMOGs. They  send us awesome ideas and encouragement every day, and that helps motivate us a lot during this challenging launch period. It's all of you that are our partners in moving this industry forward.