Wild Pockets Shanna Tellerman - Part 1

Recently Shanna Tellerman was across in Dundee to talk to, our good friends, Girl Geek Scotland, at their latest event. The Girl Geek team put us in contact and so staff writer, and soon to be US Correspondent, Rachel Shadoan and I went to meet her

Shanna is the CEO of Wild Pockets a system which will hopefully cut the costs for small time developers and give anyone the opportunity to design games.

We wanted to know more about Wild Pockets and the lady herself.

How did you first get involved in the industry?

Shanna Tellerman: My background is in the fine arts doing traditional media like paintings and drawings. I studied at Carnegie Mellon University which is a top science university in the States and it's hard, as an artist, not to get drawn into the computer labs there.

So I did a Multi Media course which was my first introduction to some of the cool things you can do with graphics and computers and this fascinated me. I took a Computer Science class which led on to a course called Building Virtual Worlds. It was a knockout; I'd never done anything like this in my past. You had your headsets on and were literally in this 3D world.

We worked in teams of four students and had three weeks to build an entire virtual reality experience using all the 3D environment models but also ensuring interactivity, experience and that any naïve users, who had no prior experience of the world we had created, could function in this interactive experience.

It was 24 hours a week in the computer lab and I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever done. So that was my introduction to the industry. The teacher was Randy Pausch who was a leading Virtual Reality (VR) scientist but he is now famous world wide when he did The Last Lecture. Have you heard of it?

No I haven't

ST: It's one of those questions. What you'd talk about in your last lecture but he unfortunately had pancreatic cancer and actually knew this was his last lecture. It's amazing and it's available online [It's incredibly worthwhile - Phil].

He got six million views on Google, he ended up on Oprah, wrote a book and that generated a movie deal and income which not only went to support his family but was also donated to pancreatic cancer research.

Randy passed away about a year ago but he had been my teacher and was a strong influence that led me into the whole industry. It was kind of mind-blowing but I decided that I was going to do a Masters in Entertainment Technology concerning everything that the future of interactivity would be dealing with; alternative reality, virtual worlds, games, interactive experiences, storytelling, really anything you could imagine in entertainment. We worked on real world projects like deliverables, clients and customers. I started working on something in my first year that ultimately led to what formed the basis of the company.

Right

ST: I had no plans to start a company whatsoever so this has all been very accidental.

Talking about virtual worlds do you have any experience of Second Life?

ST: Yes I have and it's quite funny because their office is just down the street from where I live. So I've moved into Second Life's neighbourhood.

And not virtually.

ST: [laughs] No I've actually moved into their neighbourhood. I've met with them a few times and there are cool things we can do with their technology in our environment.

In the next few months we're going to open up the possibility of moving Second Life content in to Wild Pockets. We looked at Second Life and decided that what was really great was all these creative people who design great content and they gave them tools that they could use. We also felt that sometimes it's hard when you enter an existing world. There are social pressures and also the possibility of uncontrolled experiences and its one big world.

We considered what's to stop taking people out and have a smaller version of the experience on their website or their blog. So we took the Second Life model and turned it inside out. We wanted something people could embed on any site anywhere and create a 3D environment. So the interaction with Second Life will be when we are able to export people will literally be able to take content from Second Life for their blogs, websites and networks.

Can you expand on Wild Pockets a little?

ST: The real vision was to make 3D environments more accessible and we wanted to specifically focus on independent game developers giving the opportunities for small groups of people, guys in a garage [or bedroom coders], who do it as a hobby or on the weekends to be able to create really fantastic content.

Not just simple little Flash, Facebook or iPhone games, although it's great to see the bar is rising for these showing the demand for small teams of developers to create excellent games.

There are a lot of hard things in the process of game development, especially in a 3D game. You have all the models and the assets and the whole world to develop plus the programming and the interactivity. You need to go through your debug cycle and user testing cycle a few times. Then you have to finish it, publish it and market it usually integrating some type of microtransaction system and then an analytics system at the end so you can see what's going on.

For a single developer the whole process of doing that yourself is a little bit overwhelming and usually these are not skill sets you specialise in. Your creative minded designer or developer generally just wants to create the content. What Wild Pockets tries to do is take away all of that hard stuff, have an infrastructure in place for the developer that's open and free so they can just come along and be creative.

That's the Wild Pocket philosophy; to create an online community and development environment for independent developers.

So what is the first thing that was developed on it?

ST: There have been a few games that have come out but this is early steps as we're in an early Beta. We said, "If it's going to be accessible then it has to be available in a web browser." Most 3D worlds were only available through download or on a console but we see the future as enhanced Flash. Taking Flash to the next level where there are full community environments.

The very first thing we did was to employ 3D rendering into a browser and then from there we built the rest of the infrastructure outwards. What is really unique about what we're doing is that we built the whole thing around the idea of shareable components so an independent developer starting from scratch with nothing makes the whole process of building so much longer. If you can take templates or assets that already exist you can build a lot faster.

The whole Wild Pockets concept is built around a crowd source. A user generated environment of 3D assets. So the models, textures and animations as well as sound, code and templates are all available so anyone can create and share into that marketplace. Right now everything in the Beta is free but we're going to open up the opportunity to create and sell as well, like Second Life.

So if you're just an artist interested in creating fantastic artwork that someone uses in creating their game you can. Another might be a great tool builder and make great tools that allow people to lop down zombies or so they attack at certain rates and once you've built that tool someone else might use it for a wild animal game where the animals pack together when they're chasing something. It becomes a place where people can share their tools and assets so you're not reinventing the wheel every time you get started on a game.

Are microtransactions the only model you're using?

ST: There are three models we have to make Wild Pockets pay

Much like the iPhone we take a percentage of sales whilst the developer takes the majority. They may market the game so the players can level up, buy new weapons, customisation for their characters or whatever from their store. We provide the technology which prices the things in the store and deal with the user transactions. So that is the primary method we focus on because that's also the best opportunity for a developer to make money.

If they chose to make it totally free to play there is the opportunity to do advertising in the game and then the last model is totally free of advertising. We can provide a certain bandwidth and user rate at a monthly fee. You can use it to a certain extent but if it becomes wildly popular and takes off and there's no moneterisation in place then we're going to start charging you for the extra bandwidth you are using.

It's totally up to the developer to decide which model to use.

Have you considered in game advertising?

ST: We thought about that. It's still a difficult problem because usually to do it really well it has to be highly customised. We're very well set up so a marketing firm could use this platform to advertise their product but right now we're not going to be in the centre of that. We would make our cut by charging them for the usage of the game they ended up creating.

There's a loading process for each game, a pre-rolled video, where you can advertise and as people are waiting it will be the central point that they're looking at as the game loads. That's great for advertising.

The problem with in game advertising is they charge for how much actual real estate space you've taken up in the game and how long someone actually looks at it. So if it's a bill board in a driving game and its set at an angle then you're making virtually no profit from that as a designer. You actually become responsible for recording how long each advert is being used so it would have to be integrated in a much more meaningful way and then that becomes expensive.

I'm interested in it but there isn't a solution yet that gives us reasonable leverage and since we have so much to build still.

Maybe in the future or product placement might work where you create an object that appears in games or in the game stores.

ST: Exactly. That's a great idea so the 3D marketplace may be a great place to do that. Most of our focus at the moment is on the infrastructure and letting the developers using their creative side to decide what goes into their games.

Do you see people developing into experts in the Wild Pockets format?

ST: There were a lot of different engine points. We used the scripting language of Lua so if you are interested in programming then Lua is an easy and simple to use language and very friendly like Python.

We've had people coming to these 24 hour game jams with no experience of Lua and they pick it up, work in Lua that day and they build an entire game in 24 hours. So it's a very accessible language if you already understand programming and game programming.

One of the most difficult things in games is actually building a game. That in itself can be tricky and we're going to do more and more to make it easier to program a game but in the end what our real goal is to make the prototype experience so short and so quick to iterate on that developers have more time to be experimental.

The best games come out of people playing around and accidentally finding that some mechanic is really neat and interesting. Once you've found that core mechanic you build the game around that so it's fun and addictive. Then you get some very innovative games.

That's the path we're most interested in. Something anyone can pick up and play around with. Today it's not like that and you still need some level of experience walking in whether that's programming or game mechanics so you can successfully create your first game within the system. Mostly it is more experienced people at this time but our end vision is to lower that barrier.

Wild Pockets is about the present and the future. How do you go about planning for the future?

ST: We have a lot of improvements in the works concerning delay times due to browser speeds but our biggest challenge is we're a tiny team and still at the very early stages of start up.

This means we have to categorise areas that we want to work on. So on the plug in experience there are many things that we're planning to do there to speed it up and make it a wonderful and fluid experience for the players. Our limited resources are mainly focussed on the developers and giving them the ability to create. Once we've given them that we can move on to looking at ensuring those games play very well.

There are multiple places we need to get up to that polished standard outside of Beta but we have our base systems in place.

How far do you think you're away from the Beta end?

ST: It's mostly about funding for us. At the current rate we've probably got a year's worth of work to get everything polished and up to a level of quality we're happy with. If we're successful in raising more funds in the next round we could speed that up a bit.

Do you think the change in the economic climate will help?

ST: I'm hoping so.

The important thing from an investor's point of view is reducing the risk so we're aiming to proof pieces of work we're doing and identify the community forming around the idea creating games.

So we're spending a lot of time on the development side and on making sure that our site has something quite different with the digital online element. There aren't very many software development platforms that are actually in the Cloud [the internet]. That gives us the opportunity to connect all the developers to each other, let them elaborate, share and just talk to each other in a way platforms and software can't do.

That's the area we start focussing on creating a social environment for developers as well as a place they can have their initial successes creating games. From there we can ideally proof the rest of the model, cleaning up everything from the player experience to microtranscations to our analytics system. There are a lot of places to grow.

We'll be back with Shanna tomorrow where she'll be talking about Silicon Valley, being a female in the industry and some advice on setting up a small business.