2013 Game?
 

To take the spotlight away from the FMS issues and to focus on something more fun and lighthearted, what do you think (or hope) next year's game will be? I personally want to see a game with moving targets and/or multiple ways to score. I also want to see some type of game piece that either a) hasn't been used on a while or, b) hasn't been used at all.

Does 2013= Return of the tetras?

Ideas? Thoughts?

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Seeing as the just had a couple of shooting games and another racking game, I think they're going back to a stacking game.

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Completely agree with a stacking game.

But honestly... its too early for this.

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I've been thinking about that... last year was a lot like 2007 (hanging tubes on pegs), and this year was a lot like 2006 (shooting balls into high goals... also Bill said in his talk that the "backup plan" for this year was to redo Aim High with minor changes!). Could that mean that next year will be a lot like 2005? Making new games a lot like older games could be a way to achieve the GDC's stated goal of creating two games in the time normally reserved for one... it would also make me happy, as Triple Play is still one of my favorites.

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Even I want a small break now that the season's over.

Too....soon.....

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I see what you guys mean, but I started this thread to take some of the focus of the the FMS woes right now and give people a nice, fun thread to think about and read.

Otherwise, I would have waited too.

Maybe the game this year will be stacking water filled bins...

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The tetras don't look too much fun to play with. Look too complex and frustrating.

I like the past, but I want something like 2010: Original. But it should be fun to play like this year.

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3 words "Super Smash Brothers"

Anyone else hear the theme music playing after the introduction of lots of the presenters. Im not saying I didnt like it, I think its a clue for next years game ;)

Also, the use of pirates of the Caribbean music was just awesome during the matches (I think during division eliminations).

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Could we copy and paste the entire "2012 Game" thread and scratch off anything suggested that's remotely similar to Rebound Rumble? :rolleyes:

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A lot of people noticed Smash Bros. I can see it now: "Break the targets!"

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I think that the end game should be some combination of 2011 and 2012.
Why 2011? Because it was a race, and whoever won it got more points, making the endgame HUGE at every level, as opposed to this game, where, by the time you got to division finals, everyone was tripleing. But I also want the endgame to be exiting to watch, like the bridge balancing, as opposed to minibots that moved to fast to see or too slow to care.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Look past that. The World Champions and World Finalists had extremely simple grabbers. The multi-tetra grabbers were the complex ones.


Actually, I'd like to see a return of the Stack Attack bins. Or use the KOP bins as game objects. Something with bins would be quite the twist--and 10 years after Stack Attack, perfect timing.

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Maybe Dave Lavery left us a clue somewhere... Quick, start analyzing his speech!

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Haha. Everybody's trying to find hints everywhere. I bet they haven't even decided on next year's game yet.

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Hmmm, lets see... Something about his day job= the sun (because sun=day)= PLASMA GAME! :ahh: :ahh: :ahh:

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The video at the start with the game ball being bounced up by the pinball-like flippers gave me the idea of having a pinball type game. I think that'd be cool.

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Actually, GDC members have repeatedly told us that yes, they have already created next year's game. I wouldn't be surprised if they "tweak" it between now and then, though, based off of what worked and didn't work this year.

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The Red Alliance chat was trying to find some hints for next year during Dean's speech. This is a bit of what they came up with, but I think there may have been some more clues. The quotes highlighted in blue have to do with when Dean paused after saying "connections," while the yellow highlighted posts deal with Dean's mention of "high visibility."

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inb4watergame

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Rock climbing.

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It's no secret. Bill Miller even admitted that the Kinect would be huge next year. I was laughing at all the references Dave made about the Kinect when speaking, since he acted like we didn't know it.

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I really like the 2005 game piece. It was a fun challenge to figure out the simplest way to hold it. I hope next year's game piece is something we have not seen before or at the very least something we have not seen in a long time.

I think a simple PVC pipe will present a difficult challenge especially if there is a lot of pipes to score.


I like this year's cooperation bonus compared to previous attempts. I felt its value was too high. If next year has it again, it should be weighted less than a win. Also, I think it needs to be possible for one robot to achieve it. It could be difficult for one robot to achieve compared to having two robots going for (like filling up a goal with a certain # of game pieces, two robots would be quicker). I don't want a good robot to be punished in the rankings by playing against a weak alliance that can't cooperate.

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Wouldn't one robot cooperating be similar to the sound of one hand clapping? A Zen game! :)

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Depending on how the PVC pipes are dispensed, teams who also did FTC in 2010 could have an advantage, just being able to make essentially an oversized version of their FTC scoring mechanism.

It could be done by awarding bonus seeding points to one alliance if they score a certain amount of points on their own goal. This would also add the strategic element of deciding whether or not to risk their victory by scoring points for the other alliance. It would be very interesting to see that play out.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Before or after the pipes are filled with varying amounts of water and capped? *ducks*

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If it was up to me I'd like to see a game piece like 2008. Its something that teams have seen before but on a scale that makes everything teams know about handling that type of object have to be reexamined.

As for an end game I'm a big fan of robots having to be elevated in some way. My favorite is 2007 where one robot has to elevate the others. 2004 and 2010 are fun to because it makes for a great spectator event when the end game involves robots trying to get up high in some way.

I'd like to see a co-op with the 2007 style end game as well. Co-op points based on one team elevating the other alliances robots above x height. More points for multiple robots. Get to see teams decide how many robots they think they could raise in 1 go. Plus imagine a blue robot raises 2 red robots, while the remaining red robot raises the two other blue for a full co-op.

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I, for one, approve of tetras returning.

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Tetras would be cool, but put a twist. Get a different random shape. Something like a hexagonal prism that's been hollowed out.

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It's by no means a "hint" but in the videos of the Q&A session at champs, Bill Miller mentioned that they are possibly scrapping their plan for 2013 due to seeing this year's game live. I think he meant that after seeing this year's game, they for some reason changed their mind about what they had planned. On that note, he repeatedly said they were very pleased with how cooperation worked out and that it was very hard to seed well if you didn't cooperate. So, I would expect co-op to be as value as it was this year again.

I also recall him very strongly emphasizing using the kinect in the offseason and that while this year the field did not support on-robot kinects, that may not be the case in future. Therefore, I see on-robot capabilities being a bonus next year or in 2014.

Just my thoughts....::rtm::

-Anna

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I predict stacking and/or very small game objects (similar to the FTC balls this year). Last year's FTC game involved bridges, and so did this year's FRC game. I think this will happen again. There are also the Tetras.

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Yeah I guess it would. I am searching for the robot equivalent of having to get a dresser up a flight of stairs. I once had to do it by myself. It was the longest hour of my life as moved the giant dresser one step at a time. It was so big, I could not grab it properly. It was not that heavy cause I took everything out but if I had a second person helping me, it would have been a 3 minute task.

So I am thinking of a robot task similar in theme where one robot could do it by itself but it will be very difficult. The crowd reaction could be, "that robot is going to actually try it by itself?" Maybe a dead lift of an elongated version of the 2002 goals? So one robots CG would be far away from the goal's CG.

That is another idea, if an alliances have a minimum score, the opposite team gets cooperation points.

It would encourage us as a community to help every robot to play the game. However, i think its a sad scenario if your alliance can't score and you need your opponents to score for you. Its kinda like the AYSO soccer mercy rules. I would feel even more bummed out if it happened to be. Ideally it would be that alliances won't play defense until the minimum scores are achieved.

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I think it could have something that has to do with this years FTC game. Last years FTC had balancing, and this year had balancing.

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I think they will have another game similar to this one.
easy to understand scoring/ interesting to general public.


so not tetras

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2005 was won by scoring more tetras and playing tic tac toe. I think that is pretty simple, I never had a student who struggled to grasp what 2005 game was after watching it. All you need to say, tetras are 3 points, controlling a row was 10 points. Simple

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I don't know what the nature of the game will be, but I think this graphic is particularly telling. It seems that 2012 was pretty universally acclaimed as a pretty enjoyable game, and @FRCFMS gave us data on how teams were scoring points. In Rebound Rumble, there was a pretty even distribution between the three parts of the game, teams scored about as many points in autonomous as they did in teleop, as they did in the endgame. There are obviously outliers, but in general it was pretty close. This would provide a good scoring roadmap as FIRST moves forward.



Now I'm kind of curious to see what this distribution looked like at the CMP though. There's something to be said for how the typical field plays the game versus the top tier, and the championship field was significantly outscoring the week 2 field.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Aim High II.

With a high goal that doesn't jam and real time scoring.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Sounds quite a bit like rebound rumble. Plus, I doubt that they would do similar shooting games two years in a row.

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Personally, I like the idea of tetras, batons, traffic cones, footballs, plastic bins... or other oddly shaped and unique game pieces. I even liked the inner tubes for logomotion and rack and roll, but by now inner tubes and balls seem like problems we've already solved. We know how to manipulate those game pieces and score them. So it's my hope that the GDC comes up with an interesting game piece for next year's game.

I was thinking instead of having 1 standard game piece we could have 3 different ones... they could be completely different or even just different sizes. So we'd have to build a device that could handle the 3 different game pieces, or 3 different devices... or we'd have to plan on manipulating only 1 or 2 of the game pieces... and the game pieces could all have different point values. I think it would be really interesting and challenging from both a design and strategic standpoint, making for interesting and different machines as well as gameplay.

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Something capture-the-flaggy would be cool.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

My idea isn't quite "if the opposing alliance has a certain amount of points, you get coopertition points", because in that case, if you were playing against a strong alliance you could just let them reach that score by themselves. I was thinking that one alliance would NEED to contribute a certain amount to their opponents' score to earn the bonus.

I do like the idea of a capture-the-flag style game, it would need an interesting field design though. A completely flat 27'x54' field without any sort of "base" that the flag is in would be somewhat awkward to defend.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

They did say something about better visibility too.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Oh ok. I was thinking sort of the same thing, that an elite alliance needs to score for the other alliance too if they want the bonus. That having a 100-0 score would yield only the QP points of a win.


I am kinda reluctant about capture the flag, because in 2002 it was a battle between drivetrains with the highest gear reductions and traction possible. It inspiring for me to witness such great engineering but to go through that again with so many people knowing the tricks from that year would be grueling.

In 2002, I like teams like 60 that picked up the goals. So I was thinking it would be neat to see two robots trying to dead lift a massive goal for the cooperation bonus. The rules would prohibit two robots from the same alliance touching the goal. Then an elite team could figure out a way to do the process solo. like using an alliance partner as a counterweight.

In eliminations, two of the goals would be provided, one for each alliance.

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I would be interested in either a game with more contact, or control of more pieces being allowed. I think it would probably be a lot more exciting for non-FIRST spectators to watch with more robot n robot action, or with game pieces flying everywhere, instead of being so limited.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Lets make the field a little easier to traverse as well. Box bots were next to useless this year as they couldn't lower the bridge or go over the barrier.

Last years game is an awesome example of how an even field allows box bots to be useful. 2010 wasn't too bad either since you could place them in the defensive zone from the beginning.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

If they keep following the same pattern they have been for the past few years, next year will have a flat field

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I've heard from some other members on my team that they heard Dean Kamen himself point some students in an aqueous direction for next years competition

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Based on looking at where the inspiration for the games seems to have been coming from such as 2011 vs 2007 and 2012 vs 2006, as well as bridges from last years FTC game I believe that next years game will probably (and hopefully) have some combination of the following:

1. Ramps (FTC 2012 game)
2. Non circular game pieces of different sizes (FRC 2005 & FTC 2012)
3. FIRST carts (like the ones used in Lunacy and several games before that, been awhile since we've seen them)

I really hope it's something with lots of boxes or triangles, I really like the PVC idea too! As for the high visibility statements, maybe they're going to not have walls on the side or have some weird driver stations? Only kinect driven would be too hard for rookies I'd think, but whatever it is I'm sure it will be awesome, maybe they will combine co-op with minibots too so you could use them to score like in 2011 but on some kind of co-op task get ONE seeding point (two was too much...) and of course it would have to be something else other than climbing poles.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I really hope one year, we'll have water games or something.
Make a robot that's like a dolphin, does tricks, has camera tracking to retrieve things underwater. Sounds like an idea for the 2050's lol.

ehem.. so field related games...
I once had the idea of laser tag bots after me and a group of my robotics teammates went laser- tagging.

The objective could be to get to the other side of the field and shoot down the opponent's base before the opponent does to your team's base.

the field could include obstacles like a laser wall that only robots could pass only with another robot (thus the robot requires speed and precision once both robots are past the laser wall). there could be coop points given to teams of different sides that go through the barrier together. another obstacle could be a noodle wall that will require a lot of strength to push through, but not as hard to get through as the laser wall... the robot will have to compromise strength and agility. In layman's terms, build a heavier, more fortified bot, your bot will be slower, but it will get through the mid- field barrier faster.

there should be a 5-10 second penalty on any bot that is shot. during those 5 seconds, that robot will not be able to shoot any other robot, but other robots from the opposing team will be allowed to shoot that robot.. etc.

..just a thought...

Re: 2013 Game?
 

While I like using ideas from previous games, I like original ideas too (2010 FTW). I think a mixture of the two would make the perfect game, like this year's Rebound Rumble.

I'd like to see trailers come back again, but maybe not used in the way they were in 2009 (Maybe you need to score on your alliance partners? Maybe the bottom is hollow and the pieces go in, get scored by a sensor, and come out?).

I think a wide, open field like 2009 will be present next year. It's been 4 years since we've truly had a full, open, 27x54 foot field, and I think the openness will make driving interesting (especially since by next year most everyone who was around in 2009 would have graduated). That said, I've always wanted to see something like 2009 with traction. I also would like to see the return of descoring, but making sure it's not too powerful (like in 2003, when descoring was more valuable than scoring). I'd also like to see coop like this year come back in a way, but have it worth less.

Just some thoughts.

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Whatever the game, I'm hoping next year we're allowed a little more contact AKA no restricted zones. Something where the robots get to push each other around a little bit more, where having a powerful transmission really pays off.

I'd also like to see a game where defense-specific robots are really important. So I'd go for either a football game (alliances take turns on offense like in 2006) where you have to transport a football from one side of the field to the other during the offense-specific time (you could even have field goals!), or a hockey/broomball game where each alliance has a goalie and you have to score on the other alliance (you could use the 2009 anti-traction floor to simulate ice and make the goalie zones carpet so the goalies have more traction/pushing ability).
In either of these games, I feel like there'd be alot more ties though.

I also feel like either of these games would be really fun to play, and you'd give the teams alot more of a chance for their robots to interact with each other.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I'd like to see the return of the slick wheels/field surface. They sure made the 2009 competition quite interesting. You could play very effective defense. The only issue in 2009 was scoring, it was either all or nothing. Those of us with shooters had trouble.

I highly doubt a water game. The rumors have been flying for the past two years (more than that, has just been heating up the last two years), but if you look at the KOP, it is not equipped for anything needing to be submerged. Plus I have a feeling that not too many teams are acquainted with engineering underwater/partially water vehicles. This would make it very difficult for teams to make something competitive in a water environment.

I like the idea of a Smash Bros game. I think the sound effects were an interesting hint. It could also lend to the "open field" theory. We shall see!

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The game field is on Mars sorta like lunacy field and their craters as game pieces that can stack on scoring pods to gain points and stack box like object to build a wall and the end game in having 4 miniboat drag race down a track

Re: 2013 Game?
 

You're a funny guy.

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water as a game piece

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A stacking game sounds about right, cuz the last one was with tetras in 2005, and the kinect would work real well with this type of game

Re: 2013 Game?
 

*Get's on SoapBox*

I swear this thread shows up earlier and earlier each year.....

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I don't see this as being an issue :yikes:

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Next year it'll start during build season.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

And the 2015 Game thread will start about this time next year.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Now that is a scary thought :yikes: :p

Re: 2013 Game?
 

so um, what do you think will be the 2014 game? maybe integration with android or google glasses.
I think a game where the alliance has to work together to assemble a structure would be good.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Call me a doubting Thomas, but I don't really think Google Glass is really going to take off.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

We should go back to the basics. 1992 game, tennis balls on a sand surface. T'would be fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-m1Q...feature=relmfu


*totally wastes too much time on Andy Baker's youtube channel*

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It would be pretty interesting to do a field with a non-uniform surface like sand or gravel... or water

Re: 2013 Game?
 

One item I'd like to see addressed is with the bridges. Don't get me wrong, the bridges were an incredible endgame. The problem I have is that the "cheap field" schematics that 98% of teams use in their practice spaces had bridges nowhere near the same properties as the official field bridges. I'm going to request and hope that the next field to use any sort of "dynamic" field elements have the cheap field versions be much closer to the real field's properties.

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I agree with this. This difference kind of screwed us over for balancing, we had no troubles balancing the plywood bridge, but the heavy plastic ones at competition were a different story.

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I'd say no comment... but to say "interesting" is a massive understatment.

Trust me on this--my senior design project is competing on regolith simulant at the end of the month. And I don't mean the FRP from 2009, I mean BP-1 lunar regolith simulant.

For motion, wheels with paddles attached. We've used treads in the past.

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I thought the 2012 thread did start during the 2011 build season. Does anybody want to check?

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Rebuttal:
I already stated that water games prob won't be a reality until later in the future.

Next year, hopefully, will have a more open field. I agree with SuperNerd256...

The more open the field, the more interesting the game gets... the more intricate strategies.

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Safety issue. I personally do NOT want to see giant, 120 pound robots that rise 20 feet or more into the air and have the potential to fall outside the field, potentially causing harm to the drivers/volunteers/spectators. As an FTAA on Franklin this year, I had to dodge two robots while trying to figure out why another one wasn't moving.

I like the more open field idea as well as the stacking red bots on blue bots and vice versa for co-op points idea. I'd like to see them take a page out of FLL, make it somewhat biology themed, and have Double Helix game pieces.

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Let's get back to the basics.

Playground balls. mobile goals. large balls to cap goals. Stationary goals. End game bonus of placing all mobile goals into the home zone. Mash up of 2004 and 2002, and something no one has seen in a while.

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2004 was a fun spectator game. I enjoyed watching robots climb the bar, and seeing 190's bot hang from the start, and swing their massive arm back and forth. I personally enjoy human players having the ability to score, not just feed game pieces. (when was the last time you saw defense like this? http://youtu.be/Q5nnGGRi-94). I understand why FIRST took it away, but the robot on robot contact made for some intense action.

A return of tetras could be fun. I'm trying to imagine how the game could change, so it wasn't a simple replay of 2005. I really liked this years game, up until CMP this year, 2005 was a landslide favorite for me.

A return of tote bins would be miserable. Tupperware Tossdown was my least favorite game.

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If it is sand, I know what we are gonna do
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/234/5...d86069b56d.jpg

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stacking game! a stacking water game

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2013 Game: Skee Ball

The game field has four giant skee ball tables. There will be one in each corner of the field – two for red and two for blue. The skee ball tables use maybe 5 or 6 inch diameter balls. In the center of the field is a ball pit which is initially empty. Above the ball pit is a ball bin which stores the balls at the start of the match. There will be 50 or 60 balls – half of them red and half blue. In autonomous mode, the robots deploy minibots into the empty ball pit. At the end of autonomous, the ball bin opens and all the balls fall into the ball pit. The minibots spend the entire match driving under the balls trying to find balls of the correct color and tossing them onto the field in the correct direction. The human players move the balls to a rail similar to Breakaway that rolls the balls back to the ball pit. For the endgame, there is some sort of mechanism that requires the two alliances to work together to move the balls back into the ball bin. The human players can toss balls directly into the ball bin during the endgame. The win is worth 9 points and the coopertition score is proportionate to how many balls get moved back to the ball bin (maybe 0, 3, 6, or 9.) The endgame helps field reset.

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I'd really like to see another game where there are multiple ways of scoring (2008), or maybe even multiple ways of scoring with the same game piece (2006: in the hoop, or in the lower scoring area). Something that can bring back the niche robot. Sounds pretty interesting.

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Correct me if I am wrong...
but i don't remember a game where in robot assembly was required. For example picking up a blue cube and a red cube, and putting them together inside the robot perimeter and then putting those somewhere. Teams could use the kinect to help put the pieces together and automate assembly. Kind of like Wall-E pushing the stuff inside of his body chamber and then creating the trash cube. That is what i hope is part of the game for next year.

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WELL,

We've had soccer, basketball and car racing. Time for volleyball.

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I've got 2 suggestions
1) rectangular boxes about 1' high by 2' long by 1' wide that weight about 25 lbs. Robots have to pickup boxes and stack them in one of 2 sectors of the field,(which is flat), these being a protected area on you side of the field, and the other being anywhere else, where stacks can be dismantled by opponents. the scoring per stacked box is different for the sectors. possible endgame, there are 2 ramps, you get more points if you drive onto crates stacked next to the ramps, the scoring going something like 5x the number of crates high you are. ex. 3 feet high, 15 points per robot.
2) field filled with tiny balls, like the size of ping pong balls. mixed in, with something like a ratio of 20:1, are some other larger balls like racquette balls. at each end of the field is a stepped series of 3 platforms each perhaps 8 inches high and each with a bin on it. these correspond to 1, 2, or 3 points. the thing is, only the RB's actually score points. teams, therefore need to choose between dumping huge volumes of balls quickly and filling the bins inefficiently and dumping RB's only/mostly and more slowly filling the bins but scoring more points. I don't know what the endgame would be yet.

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I'm the man at Skee Ball - just ask anybody at your local Chuck-e-Cheese. I like this idea, but I think having a ball-feeding minibot that can choose the right color of balls (esp. if it's a Tetrix-based bot, which is what 2011 was originally supposed to be) is a bit much.
There would have to be some kind of penalty for scoring ping-pong balls, or else there wouldn't be any incentive to selectively score racquette balls.

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the penalty would be that the bins wouldn't be very big, so by just dumping, you would be lessening you ability to score later and sacrificing number of possible points for speed. I think you would see midrate teams who just picked up 200 balls at a time and dumped them and highrate teams who spent the match trolling for balls and separating them internally via software and light sensors and complicated conveyors, then dumping at the end. I also like it because it opens up a lot of defense strategies, like do you just hold like a 1000 balls so no one else can get them, do you block them from getting to the bins, do you specialize in getting balls out of bins, or do you just do the traditional push them around and annoy them defense.

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And the controls have a built in delay, so you need to have hybrid control (as was intended in the 2008 game Overdrive) where you give a "high level" command, and the robot executes it sort of autonomously. This will help alleviate the need for full time communication with the robots, too.

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I want to see a game where each of the 3 robots must perform a specific task in order to achieve the game's goals. Each robot can only be ONE of the specialized options. This is gonna make alliance matching and seeds nearly impossible though

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2004 comes close.

You could herd the small balls around, (and pray that your alliance had a good human player). A few tried to catch and unload them straight from the drops.

You could hang from the bar. A half-dozen robots played bar defense as their entire game. Just about everybody had some sort of bar hanger.

You could play for the doubler balls. Most robots that did this, though, also went for the small balls.

At least one world champion did all three--internal ball hopper, doubler-grabbing arms, and a fast-winching hook for the bar.

And, as a strategy nightmare... doubler beats small, hanger beats doubler, small beats hanger.

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Actually, this could be overcome pretty easily by dumping the balls into a hopper/tank on the robot with ping-pong ball sized holes in the bottom to act as a sieve that only holds on to the larger balls, and then dumping the contents into the scoring bins.

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Although many are looking to past FRC games in order to guess at next years game, I would suggest looking to past FTC games.

The trend started (as close as I can tell) in 2011. It was stated that the minibots were added to encourage cooperation and communication between FRC and FTC teams. We were supposed to use Tetrix components, although many teams ended up just machining their own components. In 2012, the middle of the field was remarkably similar to the FTC "Get Over It!" field (bridges, barrier). I would love to see something similar to the height bonus for the crates in FTC this year. It was the perfect combination of a crowd-pleasing spectacle and a challenge that required technical innovation.

For the main game peice, I'm hoping for Tetras like some other mentioned. The 2011-2007,2012-2006,2013-2005 trend might hold like some others are predicting. Stacks would be cool too. Although I doubt this will happen because we just had a throwing game, Frisbees and footballs would be cool game pieces.

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I think that we're very likely to (again) see a game that takes significant elements from previous FRC games. Last year took tube hanging directly from 2007, and this year was Aim High's shooting + the mandatory bi-yearly sports theme + the field from 2001. The GDC keeps talking about bringing older games back, partially or wholly, and I don't see them going away from that... Tetras have been oft-discussed, but how about those tube goals that were used in many older games?

EDIT: As EricH says, the field was from 2001, not 2002.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

The idea around the game could be something like FIRSTageddon, since we will have just lived through (hopefully) the "end of the world" just a few weeks before. Or it might be something with bad luck since it's 2013, how interesting would that be, a game designed around cards, with different kinds of game pieces like spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts. Perhaps red alliance vs black alliance and if you were the clack alliance you could only use the spades and clubs and visa versa? That would be reaalllly fun, I WANT TO SEE THIS HAPPEN NOW :D:D:D

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I would like to point you towards an even more similar field obstacle. Not, as one poster thinks, from 2002, which had no barriers on the field. From 2001, Diabolical Dynamics.

That barrier had, in essence, the floor barrier from 2012 with a rail some bit higher (I want to say about a foot and a half), with a single bridge in the middle. Unlike in 2012, however, the bridge did not self-level, though it could be balanced. The 4v0 game was to load small balls into goals, throw a couple large balls on top if you could, balance the goals on the bridge, and stick as many robots on the far end of the field as you could. And do it all as fast as possible. The faster you did it, the more your points were multiplied by.

Stacking items and height bonuses: I refer you to 2003 and 1999, respectively. You'll have to look at the FRC games; FTC hadn't been invented yet and the EDUBot was still in its infancy in 2003.

FTC is following FRC, not the other way around.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Please see my earlier post. Main issue: safety

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I wouldn't mind seeing a game focusing on speed and scoring... Maybe something like hockey?

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I like a bunch of the ideas on this thread, so I combined most of them: varied game pieces/roles, open field, durable pieces, tetras, and an easily understandable game.

Here is my idea:
Have a variety of medium-sized PVC game elements - some a simple pipe with a cap on either end, some tetras, maybe some other weird shapes, with an average dimension of 2' x 2' x 2'. This would make it very difficult to manipulate each one with the same grabber, but also allow a simple box bot/snow plow (like the robot from the game animation) to score. Each of these elements needs to be brought onto your side of the field for points, similar to a capture-the-flag or Hungry Hungry Hippos. Last, PVC is durable and easy to find (although making tetras would be hard).

The endgame could revolve around stacking the PVC game pieces - give 5 points for each foot off the ground, if fully supported by other pieces and not a robot. In order to prevent a team from knocking over an intricate stack, there should be a protected zone large enough to fit a stack or two, but small enough that you couldn't pile all of the game elements in (points are still scored as long as the game piece is on your side of the field.) Stacking PVC elements on top of other elements, and not on a robot, would prevent dangerous 10+ ft-tall towers that could topple. Smaller towers would not be a major issue - a 2' PVC cube is not a significant safety hazard if elements are removed from the top down, and stacks will not tumble a significant distance out of the field - especially if the protected zone is in the middle of the field.

One problem is that announcing the score will take a while (although it does add a bit to the suspense)

Re: 2013 Game?
 

The Hunger Games: FRC Edition. But in all seriousness I am assuming the return of an unusually shaped playing piece like the tetras. It would also be nice to see a flat field again.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Did someone say "hockey"?

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh....php?p=1166651

</shameless self-promotion>

Re: 2013 Game?
 

I want it to be a "rock" wall climbing game- and less obvious references to previous challenges! Also rules that encourage strange forms of mobility.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

A stacking water game? Sounds a bit like a 'nailing jell-o to a tree' game...

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Hey... a Jello-based game would be great, a bit easier to contain than water due to its semi-solidness.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Its that time again but im thinking MArs surface with crater element you hav to stack on top of each other OR using the tetra to form a pryrimid and then have a caterpult to shoot a ball at it Kinda like Angry Birds for the game but ANgry Alliances because you haveto keep build the pyrimid

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Here's my idea (haven't seen it before). Not so much of an overall idea, but rather a specific suggestion:

Have the field covered with, say, ping-pong balls. Well, something more durable, but soft so that robots aren't damaged. Have these balls be unrelated to scoring (or maybe a small point bonus for removing them to storage bins along the sides).

With this idea, robots would have to be specifically designed to maneuver through obstacles. I feel that this would make for an interesting break from the previous FRC fields, where all 'bots almost have to use a fairly standard wheel design. Also, of course, this might lead to an actual iteration of the intro videos' famous bulldozer-bot.

Re: 2013 Game?
 

Field reset volunteers everywhere are groaning at the thought of it. I was ref for FLL this year, and the little LEGO bacteria balls were annoying enough. Now multiply that by 1000