[Official 2006 Game Design] OK, so YOU design the 2006 game...

[RyanMcE]

Game is three alliances - red, green, and blue - of two robots each on the field at the same time. Field is a 30 to 40 foot square. One alliance starts on each of three sides of the field. The fourth side opens to the audience.

There is a merry-go-round in the center of the field. This is a standard playground merry-go-round, maybe about 8 feet diameter, but without the handle bars. So its just a platform in the middle of the field that can spin. It is about one foot off the ground. At the beginning of the match, the merry-go-round begins to spin up. As the match progresses, the merry-go-round continues to accelerate, so it becomes exceedingly difficult to get on, or once on, stay on. But back to that later.

Facing each players station, there is a ramp leading up to the edge of the merry-go round, so getting on and off is facilitated. The three ramps form a one foot deep "chasm" on the side of the field facing the audience. The chasm is filled with hundreds of yellow, green, red, and blue golf balls. There are several layers of golf balls. In other words, nightmarish conditions to drive a robot around in. The golf balls are the primary scoring object, of course.

To score, a team brings golf balls from the chasm to their side of the field, where the balls are dropped into into chutes that automatically count the balls, then return them to the chasm. Kind of like fancy miniature golf. I imagine the chutes as about a foot off the ground, and about a foot deep from the driver's station. This way, the chutes are easy to access and extend across the entire side of the field, so scoring is relatively simple and therefore extremely hard to defend. As a result, no penalties are needed to prevent defensive strategies.

Each yellow ball scored subtracts a point from any team, while getting a ball with the proper team color adds ten points. Balls with the wrong team color subtract five points. If the balls are equally distributed, this means that a random dump of balls would be worth, on average, negative one quarter point per ball. So thats not very useful - but getting the right kind of ball is very useful. So, "autonomous" is ongoing, because the golf balls are far too many, too far away, and in a chasm, so the drivers will have no idea really what they are getting. The CMUcam will have to be figured out. Sorting through the golf balls then becomes a programmer's primary concern. Autonomous is no longer necessarily a "period," but an ongoing feature.

Now, back to the spinning merry-go-round. A robot on the top of the merry-go round at the end of a match adds a multiplier to their alliance's score. So the first robot increases the multiplier from 1x to 2x and the second robot from 2x to 3x. Its a huge bonus, but with some great ball collectors, it could be overcome. Or, if your alliance has a negative score near the end of the match, you will want to stay off.

The qualifications are scored in the following completely convoluted manner: take each alliance's score and rank them, from lowest to highest corresponding to one through three. For each alliance, multiply this ranking by the sum of the opposing alliances' scores. This becomes the ranking points. The ranking itself becomes qualification points. Or to leave it more convoluted, do away with qualification points altogether.

Eliminations will be even more fun. There will be nine alliances of three teams each. The first semi-final will see alliances 1, 8 and 9 go against each other. Each round will consist of three games. At the end of the third game, the team with the highest ranking out of qualification point and ranking points those three rounds advances. Each round, the alliances precess around the field, so that any favoritism from a particular starting spot is nullified. The second semifinal will face off against alliances 2, 6, and 7. The third will face off teams 3, 4, and 5. There will be thee teams left after this. The final will consist of the same format.

To adequately take into account disqualifications during the finals, an alliance's score will be equal to the score they would have gotten times the number of not disqualified robots they have at the end of the match. So if a one team gets disqualified, it essentially halves the score of the alliance. And if both get disqualified, then the alliance gets a score of zero.

Oh, and one more thing. An alliance must not ever send out the same two robots during a round. So, each of the three alliance partners will play twice in a round. This stresses bottom-to-top strength in an alliance, instead of a "main pair" and an "alternate pair" that both include the same strongest robot.

What do you all think? Yes, I am insane...