This month I would like to feature a new social games company, Gravity Bear, who has just announced their debut title, Battle Punks, which will open in Beta on Facebook coming up pretty soon here. I am pretty excited to see what comes from this company because social gaming is really emerging as a force in the casual games space and Gravity Bear seems to be heading in a great direction to both innovate and bring back some things that made a lot of us fall in love with gaming in the first place. On top of that, the president and passionate designer, Aletheia O’Neil, is a female gamer herself. And she seems incredibly cool and genuinely excited about her work, Gravity Bear, and the launch of Battle Punks. Plus, she’s a GamingAngels fan and encourages females to get their creative minds into the industry! Enjoy!

GA – Let’s start off with some general information about Gravity Bear and your role with the company.
Aletheia – Gravity Bear is made up of a tight-knit team of highly creative folks who all have a shared passion—Games! When you have a team like ours with a shared passion and a shared vision, magic happens! Our current project, Battle Punks, has been so much fun to work on and everyone in the company has played a role in influencing the direction of the game. We’re all looking forward to getting our game out to our fans so they can influence the direction the game goes in the future!
As far as my role in this company… we’ve all had to take on a variety of roles to make this company work and I’m currently wearing roughly 4 different hats (not literally – that would be silly). My background is Producer/Designer, but my duties here have been primarily the running of the business itself (operations, biz/dev, legal, etc). Looking back, I never would have pictured myself in most of these roles, but it became a matter of just having to pick things that needed to get done and doing them. Originally Phil was trying to do both the business operations and the game itself and the development was suffering as a result, so I just said “I’ll do it” and threw myself into it. Apparently I have a knack for it, because now they call me “President”, and I’m still doing it. Hopefully though I’ll be able to hand some of this stuff off eventually and get back to my first love, which is design.

GA – I see Gravity Bear is a social games company. Will you be focused mainly on Facebook, or venturing into other social media/platforms as well?
Aletheia – Gravity Bear’s mission is to create fun game experiences that people can enjoy by themselves and just as easily share with their friends and family. We see Facebook as the best place to achieve that goal so it is our primary focus for now. We take a much broader view of “social games” though, and we’ve got some strong feelings for where we want to take things down the road. However, our immediate goal is to get our first game out and make it the best possible experience for our fans. Of course, there is a lot of discovery and adventure between where we are now and where we want to be, but that’s why it’s so fun!

GA – I noticed on the Gravity Bear “about” page the phrase, “back in the day and into the future.” How do you keep the balance between the two?
Aletheia - “Back in the day” sums up all the reasons we got into this industry: our love of games and the thrill of working with a small group of highly creative people that share our goals.
Classic games relied on simple, fun core mechanics and more importantly they were developed in short time periods with small teams. This allowed the developers to test out all sorts of wild ideas and keep the ones that worked. With the longer production cycles and bigger budgets of modern videogames, this sort of fast, iterative development has become much harder to realize and as a result many of the top-selling games are very risk-averse sequels of games that people bought two and three years ago; this time with another +1 to the version number and some flashier-bangier things attached.
Our goal is to “move the clock back” as it were and make some really cool, creative games with an agile development style.
“Into the future” refers to the expansion of gaming onto social platforms; which is really the next evolution of games as we see it. Social networks have collected a critical mass of people looking for entertainment and social experiences of one form or another. Not everyone is looking for a “turn out the lights”, big commitment, long play session – which can be a lot of fun, but can also be intimidating or just downright hard to fit into your daily schedule
Putting these two things together is in fact a very natural combination rather than a challenge of “balance”. Getting “back to basics” lets us offer a fun play experience that people can sit down with for an hour or just check in on when they have five minutes to burn – which also sums up how a lot of us interact with Facebook itself.
The most exciting part of all of this is that games can now launch with a tight core of features and then expand outward as people pick and choose the parts of the experience that they like the most. As developers we are setting up a system that we can listen carefully to what people like (and hate) and grow the game over time rather than making a huge number of guesses years in advance and blindly hoping that they were all right when we ship.

GA – So Battle Punks will be in open beta next month. What was the inspiration behind this game?
Aletheia - We wanted to make a game that was fun to play and share with your friends but also provided a chance for some healthy competition among friends. Its DNA is really spread across a wide swath of sources. There are elements of Diablo mixed with Magic the Gathering, sprinkled with a little Pokemon dipped in chocolate covered oreos… mMmmmm oreos!

GA – Tell me a little more about the game itself.
Aletheia – Battle Punks is about a young hero that dreams of being the best fighter in the land. You’ll create and customize your character and then make your way through fantasy kingdoms filled with ambitious champions (your friends and family), taking every opportunity to test your mettle, and win fortune and glory.
The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward. Your goal is to win fights against other characters, and you do this by collecting weapons, spells and pets that you bring with you into battle. You get more gold and items by winning fights, so choosing the right opponent is important. All of the strategy lies in deciding which combination of items and abilities in your inventory will work best against your opponents. Once you start fighting, the matches play out like a movie and you’ll get to see how you fare.
We have a few primary features we’re focusing on for Battle Punks. One is for players to create a character they can identify with and ultimately care about. As a result, we’re putting a lot of time into creating in-depth character customization so players can create a character that is uniquely their own. Second is a system of combining items and abilities in a way that is simple to understand and use, yet exposes deep strategic options as people dig further into it. I don’t want to give away too much yet, but this design element is a crucial component that will get people coming back and experimenting with all sorts of ideas.

GA – Have you played it? What’s your opinion?
Aletheia – It’s so hard to answer this question! Obviously, I think the game is fantastic! However, I’m even more excited with where we plan to take it after it launches. We look at it as a constant work-in-progress and the nature of Facebook, and social networks make this a really exciting possibility. Besides our own ideas, we’re equally looking forward to seeing amazing, awesome ideas our players come up with. Our goal is to try and be as responsive and engaged with the community as possible, and really build the world as we go. Our immediate focus is get the game out there so our fans can start playing it Then, we start the really fun process of talking to our fans, watching what they’re doing, and then creating all kinds of cool, exciting, crazy stuff.

GA – Did you play before coming to Gravity Bear? If so, what kinds of games?
Aletheia – I’ve always been a massive game geek. When we first got our Commodore 64 it was Jumpman, M.U.L.E, Impossible Mission… Games have always been a major part of my life and my #1 form of entertainment; I can’t think of a time when I haven’t been obsessed with some game or other.
As far as modern games go I got really, really deep into Starcraft 1 (to the point of playing competitively on the ladders) and have spent literally years logged into MMOs over time (Ultima, EQ, SW:G, WoW, etc).
Professionally I spent a number of years in the Product Evaluation Group at Sony and played just about every game that ever came out on the PS1 and PS2. After that I moved on to Flagship and now Gravity Bear is my home!
I think when I was younger I just naturally assumed that games were produced in something akin to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, Oompa Loompas throwing a frog and a Tonka truck into a giant cauldron and… presto! Out comes Frogger! Once I realized that people actually made a living creating games, it was a natural leap.

GA – What other kinds of things do we have to look forward to from Gravity Bear?
Aletheia – Many fantastical and wonderful things over the years! If there is anything that we have in spades it’s ambition, talent and wild ideas. Seriously though, our main focus right now is to get Battle Punks polished and get it live, and build an active, engaged community. In the near future, you can expect to see us working feverishly to improve and expand Battle Punks to evolve it into something truly unique and special.

GA – Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions! Gravity Bear sounds like an exciting new company and I look forward to seeing what come out. It’s also great to hear from a successful female in the industry.
Aletheia – Thank you for having me! I’m such a big fan of your site—it’s inspiring to all us “girl gamers”. There are so many women out there that play games and love games, yet there are far too few women actually working in game development. It’s much better now than in the past and hopefully sites like yours will inspire females to follow their dreams and play a larger role in game development in the future.

Check out more about Gravity Bear here.
And become a fan on Facebook here.

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