FRC Blogged - Frank Answers….Monday? Again?

[RandomStyuff]

Hi,
So, I don't have any insights into how the FRC GDC does their job, but I thought some of you might be interested in hearing how another GDC does.
For the past four years I've been on the GDC for a local competition called Project Falafel in Israel. The competition is similar to BunnyBots and OCCRA.

Our process has changed significantly over the years from everyone throws their ideas in the air until one sticks and then develop that in the way we want, to a more polished process that has developed.

These days we start developing our game around the time of championships. We make a list of all the criteria we could possibly want our game to fit, and then debate about each criteria and its importance. In this stage we look at what shortcomings we had the year before.
Although it is now down, JVN had a great post that I luckily still have saved somewhere with a list of criteria that they use for VEX games. We used that as a starting point in previous years and have started to develop our own base criteria. We also spend some time every year looking at what we think teams should be developing. A few years ago we decided to stress the autonomous mode and gave it a great amount of points value to 'force' teams to do it. This year we wanted teams to make design and engineering trade-offs so our game is built in a way that makes it very hard to do it all.
There are some criteria that always stay:
* We want the game to be fun to watch (part of this is that it's easy to see who's winning)
* We want the game to look harder (impressive) than it is
* Because the competition is meant to prepare teams for the FRC we want it to be able to compete reasonably with few resources and even just a drive base.

Once we have those criteria we start thinking of games that fit the criteria. We split up into groups and think of ideas in short sessions, rotating the people within the groups. In the end we sit around a table and talk about every idea. Most ideas are thrown away at this point. Usually we are left with 8-10 ideas that we feel the basic concepts of which can be developed into a game. We then take each idea, talk about it a little more in depth (3-5 minutes per idea) and see which ones we really see good game in. We then choose the top 5 prospects and split up into groups where everyone can take the game that he/she want to and see the most potential in. In practice usually this means that we are left with 3 ideas that people actually are split between. These three ideas are developed further for another hour or so, until we get a pretty good feel for what that game would mean. We then sit around and discuss the games in depth, talking about various robots that could do the mission, how a match would look, talking about the costs involved in such a game (last year's game was similar to OverDrive in that it was a race, so an additional cost for a game like that would be a reinforced field that can take repeat high speed robots slamming into it).

Usually this ends with a weighted table where we decide which of the three games we will be focusing on.

Once we have the concept of our game, we start developing it. We go over different mechanisms that we can add or remove from the game to make it better. Things that often get switched out and played around with are the end games, autonomous, and game pieces, until the we are happy with it. Sometimes this takes weeks, sometimes just hours.
Once we have that, we start to discuss the dynamics of the game and the basic rules ranging from the regular mandatory rules to the rules that protect the dynamics we want. In this stage we usually also make more changes to the elements of the game. We usually go to a public basketball court in the area and measure out distances, play around with locations of things and make sure everything makes sense. Then we CAD the field and continue to work on the rules we want.

This year the entire process above was done in the first weekend of work. After that there's a lot of the little stuff like definitions, fixing contradictions, finding loopholes, balancing the game, deciding on score values for everything, assessing how hard it would be to referee each rule, etc.

We do a lot of research and polish work and we usually don't finish the game until September. This year we were debating rule changes until 12 hours before kickoff.

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone, but I thought it might be. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Niv
(Former Director of Project Falafel)