It was a summer of fun at Battle Company. We grew our staff, opened our new action-park, expanded our testing facilities, and partnered with Halo Outpost Discovery for their traveling Halo experience. Even with a busy season, Battle Company has continued to enhance the hardware and software products that give you the most powerful laser tag system in the industry.
If you weren’t able to attend Halo Outpost Discovery it was a really memorable experience for Halo fans. Tech blog, Engadget, described it as “a 300,000 square foot, traveling amusement park packed with experiences from Xbox’s pivotal sci-fi series [Halo]”. One of the featured attractions at this event was – The Combat Deck – a big team battle, red vs blue laser tag experience with the look and feel of the Halo universe. Who better than Battle Company to take an iconic brand like Halo and bring it to life with our powerful hardware and EDGE Game Engine. No other provider in the industry is able to seamlessly blend video games and live action gaming like Battle Company. As the event traveled nationwide the Combat Deck quickly became a fan favorite, receiving raving reviews. Our staff’s hands-on participation in this high throughput attraction will benefit all of our customers as it inspired some of the new features in EDGE 4.3.
EDGE Terminal: Full control on the go!
For this release, EDGE Terminal reaches a major milestone in its development cycle. In past versions, Terminal allowed players to login while an active game was in session. However, you weren’t able to assign guns to those players until the active session was over…we changed that. With the new Terminal, you have the ability to assign available guns to on-deck players whether signed in as guests or with CallSigns. Using this feature ensures your operation will be ahead of schedule by having your next group logged in, briefed, and geared up with their tagger, all before the active game ends. As one group exits your arena, the next group is ready to go. This feature can improve your bottom line by decreasing down time and increasing throughput, especially during your busiest hours.
Other updates to EDGE Terminal include an improvement to its leaderboard function which gives you the ability to scroll player scores. For player login, you can now use both the front or rear camera of your tablet to scan QR codes from your customers’ CallSigns on their phones.
Battle Coin Revamp
In our last update we introduced Battle Coins. The Battle Coin system enables your business to create upsells that you can offer to customers at the register. Based on feedback from our business owners, we modified the system to make this even more profitable for you. If you want to know more about how Battle Coin worked on release, you can read about it here. The current system allows you to add up to 3 items to an upsells, each item using one coin. However, instead of charging a coin per item we decided to implement a more favorable flat rate for our operators. Whether you are selling a simple weapon upgrade for $3, or go bigger and charge more for a custom character class that includes a voice profile, unique weapon, and bonus XP, your rate doesn’t change. Want to turn off upsells for a specific game in your session? Don’t worry, EDGE has you covered. Upsells can be activated per game type, saving you coins when you don’t need them and allowing you to maintain control over your experiences. You’ll find a special icon in both EDGE and EDGE Terminal on the games where upsells are active so you’ll know which games Battle Coins are enabled.
EDGE 4.3 minor updates include accessibility to the lighting tab even if the game engine is locked. If you are a mobile operator or often switch from light to dark environments, your staff will now be able to adjust the lighting without needing the password to your game engine. Some UI adjustments and bug fixes are also part of this update. EDGE 4.3 will be available tomorrow!
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working on some new products that are on the horizon as we make a push towards IAAPA 2019. Expect more news and exciting updates from Battle Company in the coming weeks.
