Designing games for the FRC audience is no easy task. We’re a passionate, intelligent and detail-oriented group of people and we find cracks in games and rules with laser-like precision.
With that, I cannot remember a year in my now 20 FRC seasons where there wasn’t SOME potentially very impactful meatball just hanging out there for the Q&A to clarify. This made teams feel uneasy and sometimes delay critical decisions until clarity was reached. Infinite Recharge has a couple small clarifications needed, but this year’s game release and ruleset have done a stellar job in my opinion of delivering a game at Day 1 that is understandable, clear and comprehensive.
I’m sure there will be plenty of clarifications needed from now until the end of Detroit CMP, but at least for now I at least would like to personally acknowledge the GDC and FIRST HQ for delivering a game at this level of clarity.
This game reminds me of 2004’s diverse task set and its resulting strategic complexity. There have been other games since then that I have liked, but none for that reason.
I agree with Brandon that GDC/HQ did an excellent job making the 2020 game clear.
I’ve been wanting to create a thread with this same intention. GDC turned my frown upside down this year. The game looks to be easy ish to build a field for, easy for spectators to understand and watch, and hard to play well throughout weeks of improvements on the field. Nice job.
As a long-time mentor, I’m a little disappointed in the lack of new technical challenges. We’ve done most of this before, several times in fact. I have to remind myself that the current crop of students in the 4-year high school window haven’t played with foam balls yet and have only hung from a bar once.
Hanging from a see-saw is new. So is color-wheel roulette.
I think the biggest new challenge is being technically capable enough so that your quals alliance partners trust you, either to cooperate on hanging for the RP, or to spin the wheel while the others are doing that.
100% agree with this. I think some of the scoring may be a little unbalanced (specifically climbing scoring weight relative to the rest of the game, feels somewhat similar to 2017), but outside of that I agree with Brando that this is the first time I don’t have a huge concern on a major rule implication or concern about field functionality. I guess we don’t have it proven yet that the goal will accurately count the balls scored which was an issue in 2017, but this is a much simpler problem then 2017 and from what I have looked at I think this will work just fine.
The only other dynamic of the game that I think is off is the way the scoring of the Control Panel structure, as it feels like it’s going to be a non-factor in the large majority of matches, which generally I don’t love having aspects of a game that are largely ignored or not utilized, but at least it doesn’t really take away from the rest of the gameplay.
Also from a lot of the Capital Ri3d members it sounds like even though we’ve dealt with foam balls before (2016, 2012, 2006) these balls are by far the hardest to deal with for intaking and indexing. Shooting them is a solved problem a least, especially with the large goal.
To address Brandon’s original post: Completely agreed, the GDC has done a pretty good job this year. The biggest issue in the manual is a pedantic reading of the word control and the confusing names for different zones. Much better than in years past, such as 2011 when we all thought we could barely reach out of our own robots for half a week.
I understand how you feel, but compare this to any other game in the last 4 years and the amount “new” challenges are at least on par to those, if not more. Hanging bar shifting is something that hasn’t really been worth developing since 2004, and it’s present here. The disc, while not really technically challenging, is at least different. Holding multiple foam balls was last seen eight years ago. And the size of the 3 point goal is unbelievably small - not the slightest bit trivial to handle.
There is a relatively easy mid-range robot to build this year that ignores the hardest of the challenges (essentially a two wide shooter into the 2 point goal that hangs in a stationary manner) - if that’s the right robot for your team to build I completely empathize with how this doesn’t feel different enough for you.
I’m definitely not saying it will be easy. There’s certainly a lot of nuance and room for optimization. But there isn’t a whole lot of the early season befuddlement happening right now, where you look at a game challenge and go “how the heck are we going to do that!?!”
Brandon, thanks for this thread. There are a lot of negative posts directed at FIRST on CD, it is important that we recognize and appreciate when they get things right.
I also feel like there is little new to the technical challenge for us old folks this year, but getting to correct mistakes we made in the past games is always nice. I expect the overall level of gameplay to be high and entertaining this year.
The fun in this game will be all the micro cycling optimizations that can be done: Cycling Optimization