Blast Zone! Tournament
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Any devs out there with a passion for BZT?
Here are our requirements:
1. Legally able to take over ownership of Victory Lap Games
* If an individual must be 18+ years old
* An American citizen/entity would be easiest as we'd transfer all share ownership of the Delaware C corp to you
* The company has no outstanding debts
* The company has a Wordpress website hosted by a2hosting as well as some domains
* The company has Xbox 1 and PS4 devkits
* The company has existing relationships with Microsoft, Sony, and Valve
* The company has a bank account with Bank of America
* The company has source code, concept and 3d art assets, sound files, and additional digital assets
* In addition, there are other minor expenses for JIRA, Google (email), a proxy service to have the fixed IP required by Sony, ...
2. Must be able to prove you have the expertise needed to maintain and improve the game
* Ability to program in C# and Unity
* Prior experience shipping games on Steam, PS4, and Xbox 1
* Do you know Playfab? Are you familiar with CloudScript?
* The game is currently on 3 platforms (PC, Xbox1, and PS4), how will you provide appropriate testing to ensure that patching the game service doesn't break it on any platform?
3. Must be able to provide a reason why you want to do this
* BZT is not generating a lot of money right now; so, why do you want to do this?
* The game has been approved by Nintendo for the Switch. We did not start the porting effort yet assume it will be a reasonable amount of optimization work to make the game perform well there. If you can do this, there is likely a revenue stream available for you.
NOTE: We are open to a school or non-profit taking ownership of BZT and using it to help teach students. The requirement would be that the curriculum must include making tangible improvements to the online game service.
If you are interested and feel you, your school, or your company qualifies for this endeavor, please email support@victorylapgames.com.
Where are they now?
In February 2017, Mike and I were elated to have the opportunity to start working on Bomb Buddies aka Blast Zone again! Our team that peaked at 4 people, and we did our best to modernize and improve the game. We added the party system, a massive single-player game mode, new auto-matching, 32 player mode, ... with the hopes of attracting both our loyal fan base as well as new players to the game.
And when Early Access began, many of our loyal player base returned! And, the feedback we received on the game was priceless. With your help, we made a myriad of improvements and fixed countless bugs. Thank you!
In Early Access, we coordinated with Valve to offer the game for free for a brief period of time. The goals were to make the game more fun for existing players, raise awareness of the game, and to establish a stable multiplayer player base that we'd be able to grow as we fixed, improved, and updated the game. Within days, Blast Zone! Tournament was added to over 1.3 million players' Steam accounts! And, we were excited - more and more players were entering into the game. We got lots of helpful feedback which we used to make more improvements to the game.
Mike and I spent 2 years to release BZT on PC, PS4, and Xbox 1. And, with all versions released, we feel our mission here is nearing completion. Keith Kawahata, the Head of Mobile for Wargaming, made us an offer to buy the source code for Blast Zone! Tournament and give us great roles at their Berlin, Germany development studio. Note: the new games have nothing gameplay-wise or theme-wise in common with BZT, yet we had built a very solid multi-platform Unity code base that is being reused.
In June 2019, we moved to Berlin and started our jobs at Wargaming. Blast Zone! Tournament's servers are still on. We'll keep them on until the ongoing server costs exceed the game's income to an unmanageable degree. NOTE: As of November 2019, the game is beginning to lose money each month.
Thank you for your support. We hope Blast Zone! Tournament brings you joy! We loved working on it and being apart of the community.
--Chris & Mike
Xbox 1 Version - Coming July 12th
Yesterday's Update
Hi everyone,
Yesterday's update included the following:
1. Full Xbox One crossplay support; also, PS4 crossplay
* NOTE: We believe Xbox One version is finally complete - awaiting approval
* Due to Sony restrictions, only PC players can crossplay with consoles - PS4 players cannot play with Xbox One players (yes our code could allow it, yet Sony's stance is clear).
2. 50% more EXP awarded for all game modes
3. Store optimizations for high-end PCs (pre-caching outfits in memory)
4. Audio improvements for Battle Royale mode
5. Localized gamepad vibration from bomb explosions
6. Tons of small bug fixes that should help make the game even more stable when using parties, playing multiplayer, ...
* These improvements were found while QA'ing the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game
Official Discord
Today's Fixes
- Audio glitch in introduction movie sequence fixed
- Revenge Bombers cannot throw bombs after the sudden death sequence starts
- More improvements to single player leaderboards
Today's update
Patch Notes
- More reliable networking, further hardened server retry cases
- In-game chat bubbles always go to the upper corner at death
- Made single player leaderboards more scalable
- Various small bug fixes
Coming Soon
- PS4 & PC cross-play arrives on February 28th
- Revenge bombers will not be able to throw bombs during Sudden Death sequence
2x More Gold - from now on!
We have decided to double the amounts of Gold drops in level up rewards. This change is live now. Gold drop rates are the same; yet if you receive gold, you'll get twice the previous amount.
200% EXP from now on!
After reviewing our top players' EXP level vs hours-played, we have decided to double the EXP received across all gameplay categories from "right now".
Hope you have a blast!