A Shocking Twist on a Classic Game

geekologymag
Dec 4, 2014
5 min read

By William Alcopra

What if there was a game that incorporated all the best parts of paintball, Airsoft and laser tag?

What if that game also had the best parts of video games like Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield?

No kidding. This game has it all: health, shields, machine guns, shotguns, respawn points, force feedback and really cool in-game sound effects.

Salivating? Good.

Meet Battlegrounds, a live gaming experience that’s a reinvention of traditional laser tag augmented with technology used in an innovative way.

They are a Toronto-based startup that aims to revolutionize laser tag.

“Battlegrounds is a reboot of laser tag. We all love video games, paintball, Airsoft and laser tag. But we couldn’t do the stuff we love in video games in real life,” said Miles Bossons, chief executive officer and founder of the game.

“The idea was to find a way to build a system that could let us have those awesome features we love in video games – customizable equipment, reactive playing fields, lots of data, and bring that into a physical playing experience and that’s where Battlegrounds came from,” Bossons said.

In terms of similarity, Battlegrounds has the same shooting mechanics, at its core, as laser tag. The gun is an ergonomically designed mash-up of the Battlegrounds team’s favourite Airsoft guns and the vest is outfitted with LEDs, vibrating force feedback motors and a Wi-Fi link to the server. The shooting mechanics were improved in this version, but “that’s where the similarity ends,” according to Bossons.

“After that, it was all about data and customizability. We record every action that the player performs in the game – where they are, what they’re doing (whether they’re pressing the trigger or switching weapons) – and we’re able to work with all that data to build really complex game systems,” he said. “So, objectives. Complex objectives or missions that are hard to do without having awareness of what’s on the game field. We can do that.”

How do they do that, you ask? Simple: chips (the processor kind).

To be accurate, there’s an 800 MHz ARM chip inside every gun. It’s roughly the equivalent of an iPhone 4, according to Bossons.

In-game, players can choose between three different types of guns – machine gun, shotgun, laser rifle using a small LED screen. “They run Linux on the guns themselves and the servers run Linux as well,” Bossons said. “With that horsepower, we can do a lot more complex calculations on the fly.” That’s right, the guns do a lot of the work.

But getting all that hardware to work together in these new ways requires the appropriate software. Cue Battlegrounds lead software developer, Andrew Murray.

It’s his job to write all of the code that runs on the gun and on the server. On the guns, that means making the buttons work, making the sound work and making the screen change as the game progresses. (A white skull and crossbones when you die, for example.) “That means describing the game rules. Making sure that the game starts and stops and the correct winners...And the rules of how the games work,” he said.

“It’s your standard software development job in a lot of ways. You have hard bugs that you can’t find. You need to dig through the code to try to fix. Turns out, it’s something stupid. You have development challenges that are common to all sorts of software development. It’s fun, but it’s also a good experience to get your hands dirty in that sort of field.”

In fact, last year’s Toronto Mini Maker Faire presented the Battlegrounds team with a problem as unique as their product.

“We thought we had a pretty good product ready to go,” Murray said. “It was a bit of a slog to get it to a point where we were confident we were playable, but we didn’t have time to test it. So when we brought it out and had a bunch of kids with massive guns shooting at each other, it would crash constantly. Like two or three minutes in, the vests would crash and the gun would go crazy and start vibrating like nuts.”

Initially, the team had no idea what was wrong. Eventually they figured it out. Turns out that the vibration motor, as it vibrated, induced a current in the serial line between two computers on-board the gun, which corrupted the data and caused the program to crash.

“It was just this bizarre bug that combines hardware and software in such a particularly unique way to our product,” Murray said.

Unlike laser tag, you know you’re getting shot and when you’re dead. In Battlegrounds your LEDs light up white (instead of your team colour) and your vest vibrates. When you die, the LEDs turn solid white.

But here comes the cool part. If you hide for three seconds, your shields go back up. But if you can’t hide and your shields go down, then you take health damage. It’s optional, but if you have the shock armband on, when you take health damage that’s when you’ll feel the electric shock.

“We can do anything from a light static shock, which really doesn’t bother you at all, up to as strong as the pain of a paintball hitting you, but without the physical risk and danger of shooting projectiles at people,” Bossons said.

The electroshock, as a force feedback mechanism, came from the team’s paintball and airsoft background.

“We knew that as fun as laser tag is, there’s a risk element that’s missing from laser tag. The game is still fun without electroshock. But when you do play with shock you’re actually risking something; you’re asked to play a bit more carefully,” Bossons said.

“The game changes dramatically when players have the shock band on,” he said. Originally the team thought that people would think they are crazy for having it. Of the 400 beta testers, about 95 per cent chose to wear the shock bands. They loved the additional level of force feedback.

Joyce Estaris, a 17-year-old gamer played the game for the first time last month. She’s an avid gamer and immediately recognized Battlegrounds’ similarity to first-person shooters. Estaris has also played paintball and laser tag before. She wanted to know what made Battlegrounds so different.

After a three-minute game, she came out breathless. “It was exhilarating, because it was really dark to start with and it had a lot of obstacle courses with different walls,” she said. “You couldn’t see everyone. So it was almost a maze. Since it was such a small closed area, you bump into your enemies often, so it’s this sort of flight-or-fight response. It’s really fun.”

Despite positive feedback from players, the Battlegrounds team says they still have a lot of work to do. They plan to open their first playing facility in April 2015 near Yorkdale Mall.

In the first week of December, Battlegrounds launched an Indiegogo campaign to pre-sell tickets to the first playing facility.

“We open that playing field in April and from there we’ll tweak the game,” Bossons said. “The first players, through the Indiegogo backers, they’ll get a chance to have their feedback and input come back to us and help tweak and shape the game for the people that come afterwards.”