Reviving Battle Zone, With Your Help
Hello guys...
For anyone who's new to the audio gaming community and doesn't know what Battle Zone is, I'll explain a little bit.
In 2011, Philip released a game engine known as BGT, and his goal for making it was to allow people to code audio games easier without the hassle of having to hunt down a bunch of libraries to make it happen. Throughout BGT's development, Carlos Macintosh, affectionately known as Keywasfull, began work on his new title, Battle Zone. At first this was just a simple side scroller, but it quickly evolved into a huge game that gained wide spread recognition among hundreds if not thousands of blind people in the audio gaming community. Interesting fact, it was also one of three games that gained a tun of reputation at the Governor Morhead school for the blind in Raleigh, North Carolina. The other two were Descent into Madness and The Last Crusade. Eventually, Carlos dropped support for the game some time in 2017, 7 years after the game was developed.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "What the hell does this have to do with you. You're just some random guy who posts a lot of stuff on the forum." So, bare with me just a minute while I explain myself.
I'm a high school student in North Carolina, and I am a major geek. I will tinker and screw around with just about anything I can get my hands on, which explains why I've broken a lot of things in the past and got into trouble a few times. Just a month or maybe two ago, I was messaging my friend Jack and I said, "You know, Battle Zone was a great game, but Key isn't supporting it any more, and he recently open sourced it, so lets do something with it." So we went to his website and tried to get the game. Unfortunately, we got a 404 error when trying to download it. I talked to him and it seems that he no longer has the latest version of the source , so he gave us the source for version 13.1 which is close enough. I asked him just to clarify if I could do what I want with it as long as he's credited as the original developer, and he said yes. So, off to work we went. Originally we wanted to complete the version that already exists by adding the third boss to it, and then making it bigger. Jack said he wanted to hold off the third boss for now. So I asked Key if I could append the name pro to the end of it, and he said yes again. He also stated that he was pretty much done with the project.
So with that, it was called Battle Zone Pro. Now, here's a little tidbit about me. I am extremely ambitious and have really huge ideas for what I want to do with something. Because of this, I wanted to make Battle Zone a platforming game. Jack quickly talked me out of this, informing me that this game, being a hack-n-slash at its core, was never intended to be that way. Now, my new idea is to make it like bzr, with the same story elements and everything that made the original Battle Zone so great.
So, that's our story. Lastly, I'd like to tell you how all of you can play into this.
One of our goals for BZP is to use sounds that we have the rights to instead of stolen sounds. So far we're doing a good job with that, but one thing that makes it more difficult are the enemies. Our idea is, if we can get people to make enough enemy sounds for us, then it'll make our job easier. That's where you guys come in. We don't have a planned release date for this revamp, so there are no time constraints. All you guys have to do is submit your voice clips here in this topic, or send them to me via email or pm. Here's the list of sounds that we need for the enemies. We need at least one of each, but you can have more if you want.
Death sound
Falling down a pit sound
Light pain grunt.
Heavy pain grunt.
Swing grunt sound, i.e., when the enemy swings a Millay weapon.
Taunt
You can record them however you want. If you want to send a single file with all the clips you can do that, or you can send them in a zip. You also don't have to make it human, if you want to make it a chipmunk on steroids or a behemoth with sunglasses, you can do that. All we ask is that you don't steal sounds from anyone else, and try to use a mic that doesn't have tuns of background noise or buzzing or anything like that.
Thank you to anyone who decided to sit through this post. If you have any questions, complaints, insults, diatribes, or anything of the sort, let us know. All kidding aside, we do ask you to try to keep your criticism constructive.
Thanks for reading and go crazy, or something.
(Posted by Garrett, edited by Jack)
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