Quote:
Originally Posted by TDav540
The counter argument I have to both those two games is that they are both very complex. While that design makes it super interesting for the majority of participants in FRC, it makes it significantly more difficult to explain to the average sponsor, parent, or newbie. And, at the end of the day, isn't that the target audience?
I'm hoping the GDC will pull out a much simpler game in 2018.
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Personally I think both of these games have been very spectator friendly and very easy to explain to people outside of FIRST.
Stronghold: "We shoot dodge balls which are called boulders into a tower. We drive over field obstacles which are called defenses. At the end of the match we climb a bar. It also has a cool medieval theme going on."
Steamworks: "We shoot wiffle balls which are called Fuel into a high goal which is called the Boiler. We also place Gear shaped pieces onto lifts which are connected to a big platform on the field called the Airship. Team members stand on the Airship and retrieve the Gears from the lifts and place them on the Airship for points. At the end of the game we climb a rope. The whole game has a cool steampunk theme."
Explaining FRC games is usually very easy to do if you don't try to throw too much information at people out of the gate.
Each of the last two games have/are going to be incredibly cool to watch. During Steamworks, we're going to see machine gun robots shooting hundreds of wiffle balls in the air. There are going to be fast robots ramming into each other at high speeds. The robots (the designs I've seen and the Ri3D robots) look really cool. Plus both years' robots are going to be incredibly cool for demos.
I love that the GDC has found a winning formula. There's something valuable and impactful that rookie/low resource teams can do with little more than a drivetrain. That's huge because all the students on those teams are going to feel accomplished and proud of their work. It also helps the visual appeal of the game. Every robot should be able to contribute which will result in much more interesting matches. We also shouldn't see a single 0-0 score barring an extreme oversight... With or without the themes, Stronghold and Steamworks are very well designed games.