Delivered at Casual Connect USA 2018. In 1997 Mike was part of the leadership at Activision responsible for developing the re-imagined Battlezone game. Last year he led the team that released Battlezone 98: Redux on the Steam, GOG and Mac/iOS app stores. In this new talk, Mike ruminates about the development process behind the various Battlezone games and discusses the challenges presented when resurrecting a PC game old enough to get its driver's license.

1. Reinventing a classic…again.

2. A continuation of the talk I gave at CC Seattle
but with less content
Not informative
Baddly ritten
Boring
Full of bad info

3. 30 year veteran game producer
Acclaim, Sony, Fox, Activision,
Crave, Mumbojumbo
100+ games shipped as producer
Simpsons, WWF, Die Hard Trilogy,
AVP, UFC, Tokyo Xtreme Racer,
Battlezone
Currently run Big Boat interactive

4. 1997: Went to Activision to work on
Lost Brigade/Battlezone at
Activision
April 2015: Started work on
Battlezone 98: Redux
Jan 2017: Started work on
Battlezone 2!

5. Shipped in 1998
(same week as
starcraft!)
Merging of the 2
top genres at the
time, RTS and FPS
Very highly rated
game, PC gamer
gave 5-stars
Great story: cold
war in space.

7. Based on the original codebase with gameplay
100% untouched
Upgraded renderer (ogre)
All new art
Tuned up effects
Steam based MP-invites/achievements
Massive improvements to modding including
steam workshop (300+ items)

10. Using original models we upgraded all the
models and textures:

13. One of the really smart things we did
Picked 16-20 of the most die hard community
members.
Generally knew the game better then we did
Many had skills and were more then willing to
help

14. One wrote a terrain texture tool we used
One was the last human on the planet that
knew how to make changes to vehicle collision
One guy just started rescripting all the weapon
effects
We hired that guy!

15. Its great to have an existing community
Team started too small, we underestimated a lot,
mostly Multiplayer
Development approach was a bit overboard. We
tried to upgrade EVERYTHING and we allowed too
much feature creep!
Performance was a problem.
We really didn’t test on the low end enough

16. Shipped in Dec 1999
Like Battlezone 1, but
with a new engine
and some big changes
to gameplay
Press loved it a little
less then the original
Cleaner more sterile
art style
Developed by
Pandemic

17. Much better starting point then BZ1. Newer
engine, less garbage.
More focused development plan
Upgraded rendering, DX7 to DX11 with shader
support
Fix the very broken MP
Add a boatload of mod support
Less feature creep!

18. Part of the plan for BZ2 was for a more focused
development building on the many lessons
learned developing BZR
Part of the plan is to focus on tuning up the art,
not redoing it all
Shaders and better lighting is big bang for the
buck
Battlezone Community to the rescue!

19. Existing mod by a single artist
All the art we needed
Not shippable, but a great starting point
The artist agreed to help
All the models needed tuneups and
spec/normal maps
Not super high poly, but much better then what
we started with and looks great!
Lower poly good for performance

22. Most of the screen is terrain
BZ games use a height map terrain. Pretty
simple system
BZ1 we punted to keep the visuals true to the
original, but it never felt right.
Enter Jayden, former community member
He did a sample terrain and it blew us away, and
we had to have all the terrain redone

24. Didn’t plan to redo pilots
Jayden had a bug about pilot animation and
redid one
Damn, he did it again, now we need to redo
them all!

29. Follow me @zonomike
markin@bigboatinteractive.com
Tweet the talk!