Quote:
Originally Posted by CalTran
Alas, if only figuring out what makes or breaks a game were that simple. Particularly in the method that FIRST presents the games, it's hard to think outside the normal configuration when Breakaway was described best as robot soccer or Rebound Rumble as robot basketball. The description really drives the design, as many teams forget that Breakaway was not soccer reliant, but simply a name of the game where the goal was transport a ball to a hole in the wall.
Personally, I'm a Breakaway fan (With heavy bias as it was my rookie season.) Everything that year, from being the third pick of the second alliance at Greater Kansas City with 16 and 1625, to rising to the #1 Seed and first alliance captains in Oklahoma City, to striding across the floor of the Georgia Dome, was amazing. The robots, IMHO, were totally different that year too. As stated, it takes an eye that sees past the exterior generic box shape and sees what's within the box that truly amazed me.
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Coincidentally it was my rookie year as well. I couldn't stand watching matches, mostly because of the frustration of having to see a bunch of teams in qualifications try to simply push the balls into the goals and continuously have it bounce out or roll back down. Unless there was a team (or, if you got lucky, teams) with a good shooter on the field it was simply a robotic interpretation of Sisyphus and the boulder.
I will concede that there most certainly were a bunch of different ways that teams built their robots, though I found them to not make as much difference as in other years. Most other games tended to have a couple of different 'positions' to play, each requiring a distinctly styled robot. In 2009 'shooters' and 'dumpers' played the game very differently and couldn't be interchanged. In 2008 you had tiny but fast lap-bots weaving in between hurdlers like 16 and 1114 that would shoot trackballs across the field. Heck, in 2007 each team chose between any of three 'classes' with different height and weight limits. But in 2010, any rear or middle zone shooting robot could play ball-pusher in the front zone, and any good ball pusher still had a good ball-grabber and decent kicker, so they could move back as well (though obviously each robot and driver had a position they liked best).
I guess my point would be that there wasn't much in the game that necessitated making distinct design 'direction' choices and strategizing around the trade-offs associated with them.