Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design

[ouellet348]

Originally Posted by kgargiulo

More specifically, it is unintended external references that can hurt you.

Fair. The issue with using any software program when you're self taught is that best practices come about from trial and error more so than a conscious logical choice. Many new users come across external references issues whereas in industry it's far less of an issue due to formalized training and best practices being taught. Even lacking those, most companies have some sort of standardized procedure or design philosophy in place.

[IronicDeadBird]

Biggest obstacle hands down for me is waiting for information.
When you are designing for a static game it is really easy to come up with a game plan and run it when the rules don't change like in Chess you can try an opening against a bunch of different openings because the rules are static. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending upon my temper) FRC games are fluid and dynamic and the rules change. Once that happens then the game mechanics change, then designs and strategies for games need to be re analyzed. So the biggest obstacle for me when trying to design something is the resource and information gathering aspect.
Maximum respect to the GDC for having a Q&A system, and for keeping regular updates but the fact that what is viable day 1 and what is viable day 21 can vastly differ throws a major wrench in the works. The biggest time sink I had this year was when the game first came out I was like "lol Ill just drop anchors into the step bins and pull them all into the auto zone for resource denial and multiple bin sets points." It was a simple really powerful opening to a match and it would dictate a lot of design rules. But I had to wait for the Q&A because I needed to know if multiple bin sets could exist. When the Q&A went live they said "yeah no, one set" and also someone caught the technicality I found where the landfill zone was an area and the GDC made it into a volume and I was really sad...

TLR The games tendency to change is the biggest obstacle

[Ari423]

I would say on my team the biggest obstacle we encounter every year is sticking to our design parameters. At the beginning of the season, like most teams, we meet and discuss what part of the game we think is most important, and we brainstorm possible ways to play the game. However, after a little bit of prototyping and ordering some parts, we often forget what we decided we would focus on and begin working on other mechanisms we deemed less worthy of our time. Since we are a small team with limited resources, we often don't have a CAD team to design a robot before it's built or enough resources to play the entire game (rather than just play one part of it).

For example, in 2014 we decided that being able to pick up the ball off the floor was more important than being able to shoot or truss it. But after the first week, our head of the manipulator team started designing a launcher, before we even had an idea of how to pick up the ball. In the end of build, we had a robot with a catapult that could fire okay, but no pick-up mechanism, meaning our catapult was useless. Furthermore, the catapult was designed in a way that adding a pick-up mechanism was virtually impossible without completely rebuilding the robot, a task we could not do. We ended up only playing defense for the entire season, and it was the worst season for my team in recent memory.

Thankfully, last year (2015 season) we made more of a point to stick to our original design priorities and we had our best season since our founding in 1999.

In ancient literature, the hero's flaws can almost always be attributed to forgetfulness. Aeneas forgetting his need found Rome, Odysseus's forgetting to leave Circe, Theseus forgetting to raise the white sails, and many more examples. And forgetfulness still plagues us today. It's almost like they were trying to tell us something.