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Originally Posted by Arefin Bari
By the way, Mike Walker scored the highest point EVER in FIRST history yesterday. =)
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Mike Walker also received the most penalties of anyone at the event, five points for every time he didn't click the right button on his own software.
(I'm being serious about the penalties thing; thirty matches plus elimination rounds, and the refs didn't throw a single flag on teams. I loved it.)
For all the props I've been getting about the rules to Aim, well, Kinda High, I have to note that I did very little in the way of the game concept. By the time I entered the room with the GDC, just about everything but scoring had been hammered out. My main contribution was to write it into a manual, which surprisingly fit onto one sheet. (Alright, so I did contribute the tournament rules on abolishing the serpentine draft, team rotation, and threatening a Poof ball attack on anyone who graciously accepted. But that was it, I swear.)
I've got a few folks to thank:
Every single team who stuck it out and ran on Saturday. These teams were competing about every three or four matches on about an eight-minute match cycle. They were flexible, too; 1592 left after Friday, and with everything else we just didn't have the time to crank out a new match listing. So the six or so teams affected were given a solution to keep the matches reasonably fair: pick a partner, any partner, which we also extended to robots who were broken down for one reason or another. We always had four robots on the field, with some teams even running back-to-back matches just to accomplish this goal. Teams that made the finals were playing over a dozen matches by the end of the day. Talk all you want about how hardcore your team might be, but these teams played quite literally through hell and high water for the love of the game.
Mike Walker for letting me get a crack at the Hatch scoring software.
(I somehow succeeded in beating the software into submission, making it generate the 2v2 matches we had planned elsewhere without crashing.) Mike also developed the awesome RTS system you saw on the big screen, complete with a clicker system made from momentary switches and a hacked-up USB keyboard. It was a thing of ghettofabbed beauty.
Arefin Bari for letting me crash with him, and for helping organize the whole shebang.
All of the folks who tuned in on the web feed, for letting us know what you thought of the game. We're glad you liked it as much as we did.
Everybody from DeVry for bending over backwards to help us. With all of the game design going on, we were going on a lot of assumptions; when the idea was pitched to the DeVry staff, they asked all of the questions that needed to be asked, particularly involving safety to robots, people, and building alike. (If you looked carefully on the webcast, you would've seen that we protected the walls near the ramp with the lexan from the deleted player stations and corner goals.) And when the manual was ready, they got me to a printer and copier within minutes to get enough copies for everyone involved. These folks are a class act.
The FIRST GDC for creating a game that lent itself to close-quarters-friendly robots and a field that assembles in odd configurations so well that if the FIRST logos on the ramps hadn't been chopped off, you'd swear that the Aim, well, Kinda High field was the way that it was supposed to be.
Barry Bonzack for the lift to the train station and the lively wake-up. (You know you're lost when you get directions from a deputy that include "If anybody approaches your car, run that stop sign.")
Tytus Gerrish for the lift from the train station, and for putting up with all of our Michael Jackson jokes.
If I think of anybody else, I'll edit.