[Official 2007 Game Design] OK, so YOU design the 2007 game...

[Billfred]

Let's try something different. As much as I love these big, hulking robots, I found out this season through FVC that smaller robots can be a hoot as well. (Plus they're cheaper to build, what with lower shipping weights and smaller material costs.)

So let's imagine a field about 24' square, with the player stations perpendicular to each other to form a diamond shape on the floor. (In theory, this could allow regionals with more space to run two fields, GTR-style, allow smaller venues to add more teams, or reduce the cost of shipping the field to off-seasons.) To the ends of the player stations are ball corrals, narrower than this year's and shorter. Robots shrink as well in both size and weight to fit the smaller field, although perhaps not as drastically.

Instead of the traditional 3v3, let's spice it up and make it 2v2v1. The sole objective of the loner robot is to attempt to keep the gap between the winning and losing scores to an absolute minimum, and would result in the ranking system looking something like the FVC arrangement from this season. While competing, any penalties would be added to their score instead of subtracted, and a DQ would result in them receiving the winning score as their score. In elimination rounds, the loner is not used.

To steal yet another item from Half-Pipe Hustle, let's use racquetballs for the game pieces. Several dozen of them are placed at midfield within a box taped off on the floor. More lines go from the box to the starting locations of each of the robots. Placed at the edge of the field, opposite the player stations, are several troughs with a backboard, the ones on the ends on hinges. The ones on hinges stay up unless pulled down, but they can be returned to their upright state by a properly-designed robot. Troughs are assigned to each alliance at random at the start of the match, using a Verbrugge-on-Einstein light.

Robots start out along the walls in front of their player stations, with the loner set up in the corner opposite the player stations. (One player station would remain empty during the match if the 2005-2006 player stations were used unless you made the field pentagonal, which, now that I think of it, would be interesting to see.) The fifteen-second autonomous portion of the match starts with robots going for the balls at midfield, scooping up balls and, if they're especially good, starting to score for their alliance.

The next thirty seconds of the match are played with the drivers and operators using special controls, each one using four momentary switches to control the robots--no joysticks yet. Successful teams can use either line tracking or the CMUcam to automatically navigate the field and score, while less-advanced teams could simply map the buttons to forwards/backwards/turn left/turn right. The remaining 1:30 are full-on human operations, like we've seen before.

During the match, robots are either directly dumping balls into their troughs, descoring the other alliance's balls either by sucking balls out or dumping them outright, propping up goals that are dumped, or playing defense against potential dumping. Human players can introduce balls through the corrals by the corners, either shooting for troughs or loading up other robots. Balls in static troughs are one point, while those in tippable troughs are good for three.

To finish the match, teams race to fit themselves inside the box of balls, which is conveniently sized to fit only two or three robots. Those fully inside receive a twenty-point bonus. (The loner cannot score in this regard, as he is officially neutral, but there is nothing stopping them from trying to fit in regardless.)