Diversity of Design

[mrnoble]

Celebrate diversity! At least that's what I want to do. I am seeing a much greater variety of solutions for this game than might have been expected from the early days. There are definitely a lot of designs influenced by Ri3D/Boom Done, as well as many who've taken cues from 1114 and other greats. That's fantastic, and the teams that have successfully adapted these should be very happy and proud. But I'm also seeing a lot of other ideas for collecting, passing and shooting that are following other archetypes or are even unique (or nearly so). That makes me very excited! We will be seeing lots of unexpected and creative things this year. Well done, all. Keep it up.

[wesleyac]

One of the great things about RI3D, Build Blitz, and everyone sharing designs is that people will end up reusing and modifying ideas. Our robot basically came from a lot of "Look, other people did this. Let's prototype it." That results in many designs that are similar, but adapted in various ways. If you look at all the shooter designs of a specific type, almost none of them are the same. Ditto with intakes, and every other part of the robot.

A great side effect of Ariel Assist that has a similar end result is the role that strategy plays. Even 2 similar robots could be played very differently this year. That's quite exciting, and a bit scary, because so much more will depend on alliance partners.

[Wayne TenBrink]

We put a one week (well, almost) embargo on viewing Ri3D robots in an attempt to come up with our own plan and not just our own version of everybody else's. Then, we checked them out to make sure we weren't overlooking something significant. The result is quite "diverse" from other stuff we have seen. Hopefully that turns out to be a good thing...