[FRC Blog] The 2016 Season, by the Numbers

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by jijiglobe

I had quite a different experience. I explained the game as a tower-defense game to most people and they seemed quite excited by it. This especially appealed to high schoolers who have experience playing tower-defense games but might not have been interested in robotics. At the end of the day, appealing to high schoolers is kinda the point. The theme made the game easier to explain and more interesting to watch for outsiders. I also liked the medieval fanfare because it added a bit of flavor and excitement to the events (also felt pretty sweet carrying a division standard onto the field ). I'm not sure how long they'll be able to come up with unique, well-integrated themes (perhaps a 4-year theme cycle?) I also think that one of the reasons that FIRST Stronghold is one of the most beloved FRC games in recent history is that it had such a strong driving vision behind it. You might say that that Stronghold would have been better with the exact same game, without the theme, but I highly doubt the current game design would have been reached without the theme.

Its very dependent on who you are showing the robot off to. Since we have been out since week 2 we have had quite a bit of demo time. At certain demos we explain it different ways. I'll give 3 example of demos. The first demo we did was at the Google HQ in NYC there we went in depth about the game explained it as tower defense and talked quite a bit about autonomy. Our second demo was at an elementary school Dodgeball fundraiser supporting autism awareness. There we simply said it shot Dodgeballs for the most part. When kids seemed interested we went more in depth talking about different obstacles and castles but usually they were happy enough with us saying it shot Dodgeballs and us explaining how it did it. The third demo was more informal and was at the school play which we sell snacks at. There were quite a bit of kids in our school who were turned off by the medieval aspect and didn't really understand the idea of Castle defense in fact they really just wanted to play catch with it. We gained a member that day.

But again I'm just one voice among many thousands. Based on the crazy lack of complaints they did well this year.

So what's next year's theme space or wild west?