FRC Blogged - Frank Answers….Monday? Again?

FIRST General Forum
1

Posted on the FRC Blog, 11/11/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-frank-answers-fridays-11112013

http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Robotics_Programs/FRC/FIRST-FRC-FrankAnswersFridays.jpg
Frank Answers….Monday? Again?

Blog Date: Monday, November 11, 2013 - 07:51

Sorry for the delay on this one!

This week’s question comes from Eric Husmann, who is currently between teams, and is from the Los Angeles area, California, USA:

Question:

*I was wondering about some of the workings of the FRC Game Design Committee. Specifically:

–What are some of their constraints? Or, to put it another way, what objectives do the games need to meet?

–What is the (current) approximate development timeline?

–How are the game hints chosen and/or developed? (And… have any “red herrings” been released for 2014?)

–Is there a way for non-GDC members to give suggestions to the GDC on what they would like to see in a game, ranging from small elements to full games? (If not, can one be developed?)*

Answer:

Thanks for the question, Eric.

We are trying a new game design process for the 2015 game. The process includes written objectives, clear phases, and milestone reviews. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to list the specific objectives of the 2015 game here, but the general objectives are just what you would expect - we want a game that’s safe, that’s exciting to play and to watch, that’s good for both rookies and veterans, that’s challenging, that has real time scoring, etc. The list goes on, but I think it’s fair to say there would be few surprises in the general objectives list for most folks in the community.

We’ve already started work on the 2015 game. We kicked things off with an on-site meeting here in Manchester the weekend of October 5th. We would like to have the game design mostly complete by the FIRST Championship, though all involved recognize that’s an aggressive schedule.

For game hints, typically someone on the Game Design Committee or an FRC staff member will send out an email with an idea to start us off, then it’s built on. The idea will go around a few times before it’s finalized. The process is very loose. We don’t spend too much time on this because it’s a very busy time of the year. Also, if I we had released any red herrings for 2014 we probably wouldn’t be pointing them out right now. :slight_smile:

Last season we surveyed teams about what they thought of the 2013 game and what they liked to see in games. We will be doing that again in 2014. Some of the questions will include open-ended comment boxes, those would be a good place to put game suggestions.

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

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http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-frank-answers-fridays-11112013

http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Robotics_Programs/FRC/FIRST-FRC-FrankAnswersFridays.jpg

Sorry for the delay on this one!

This week’s question comes from Eric Husmann, who is currently between teams, and is from the Los Angeles area, California, USA:

Question:

*I was wondering about some of the workings of the FRC Game Design Committee. Specifically:

–What are some of their constraints? Or, to put it another way, what objectives do the games need to meet?

–What is the (current) approximate development timeline?

–How are the game hints chosen and/or developed? (And… have any “red herrings” been released for 2014?)

–Is there a way for non-GDC members to give suggestions to the GDC on what they would like to see in a game, ranging from small elements to full games? (If not, can one be developed?)*

Answer:

Thanks for the question, Eric.

We are trying a new game design process for the 2015 game. The process includes written objectives, clear phases, and milestone reviews. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to list the specific objectives of the 2015 game here, but the general objectives are just what you would expect - we want a game that’s safe, that’s exciting to play and to watch, that’s good for both rookies and veterans, that’s challenging, that has real time scoring, etc. The list goes on, but I think it’s fair to say there would be few surprises in the general objectives list for most folks in the community.

We’ve already started work on the 2015 game. We kicked things off with an on-site meeting here in Manchester the weekend of October 5th. We would like to have the game design mostly complete by the FIRST Championship, though all involved recognize that’s an aggressive schedule.

For game hints, typically someone on the Game Design Committee or an FRC staff member will send out an email with an idea to start us off, then it’s built on. The idea will go around a few times before it’s finalized. The process is very loose. We don’t spend too much time on this because it’s a very busy time of the year. Also, if I we had released any red herrings for 2014 we probably wouldn’t be pointing them out right now. :slight_smile:

Last season we surveyed teams about what they thought of the 2013 game and what they liked to see in games. We will be doing that again in 2014. Some of the questions will include open-ended comment boxes, those would be a good place to put game suggestions.

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

3

Clearly this entire post is a game hint!

Let the speculation commence!

4

NO!

5

I’ve thought for a while the GDC works on games two or three years in advance. Looking back, you’ll see game elements or challenges that are ‘piloted’ in one game, then a more fully developed version of it pops up about two to three years later.
I’m sure we’d all love to be a fly on the GDC wall - not for the specific game knowledge “cheats”, but just to watch the process unfold and track the thoughts and reasons behind the games.

6

I believe Frank said somewhere that 2013 was a special case where they took everything everyone said about 2012 and retooled the 2013 game around it. No idea if it was a clean sweep or not, but there is precedent for games being affected one year apart as well as 2. The most obvious has to be the way the GDC has developed safe zones for scoring from the penalty party in 2011 to a very specific set of requirements in 2013, and the new way they score fouls (which has both good and bad qualities).

There’s no question that there have been significant improvements over the years that are a result of feedback seen on the field and spoken of off it. Some stuff takes time to adjust to (there was some animosity to current bumper rules at first, I recall, but now I can’t see how you could identify alliances any better) and I wager the 2014 game will take everything everyone liked about the last 3 seasons and blend it together pretty effectively.

7

My son came up with the theory that the GDC has, for any given year, ten different fully developed games prepared…and releases the one that no one correctly guessed on CD. On the chance that this is true we need to (1) conspiratorially and secretly choose the game we want, then (2) “Speculate” every other possibility to eliminate them. See…it’s simple!

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Hi,
So, I don’t have any insights into how the FRC GDC does their job, but I thought some of you might be interested in hearing how another GDC does.
For the past four years I’ve been on the GDC for a local competition called Project Falafel in Israel. The competition is similar to BunnyBots and OCCRA.

Our process has changed significantly over the years from everyone throws their ideas in the air until one sticks and then develop that in the way we want, to a more polished process that has developed.

These days we start developing our game around the time of championships. We make a list of all the criteria we could possibly want our game to fit, and then debate about each criteria and its importance. In this stage we look at what shortcomings we had the year before.
Although it is now down, JVN had a great post that I luckily still have saved somewhere with a list of criteria that they use for VEX games. We used that as a starting point in previous years and have started to develop our own base criteria. We also spend some time every year looking at what we think teams should be developing. A few years ago we decided to stress the autonomous mode and gave it a great amount of points value to ‘force’ teams to do it. This year we wanted teams to make design and engineering trade-offs so our game is built in a way that makes it very hard to do it all.
There are some criteria that always stay:

  • We want the game to be fun to watch (part of this is that it’s easy to see who’s winning)
  • We want the game to look harder (impressive) than it is
  • Because the competition is meant to prepare teams for the FRC we want it to be able to compete reasonably with few resources and even just a drive base.

Once we have those criteria we start thinking of games that fit the criteria. We split up into groups and think of ideas in short sessions, rotating the people within the groups. In the end we sit around a table and talk about every idea. Most ideas are thrown away at this point. Usually we are left with 8-10 ideas that we feel the basic concepts of which can be developed into a game. We then take each idea, talk about it a little more in depth (3-5 minutes per idea) and see which ones we really see good game in. We then choose the top 5 prospects and split up into groups where everyone can take the game that he/she want to and see the most potential in. In practice usually this means that we are left with 3 ideas that people actually are split between. These three ideas are developed further for another hour or so, until we get a pretty good feel for what that game would mean. We then sit around and discuss the games in depth, talking about various robots that could do the mission, how a match would look, talking about the costs involved in such a game (last year’s game was similar to OverDrive in that it was a race, so an additional cost for a game like that would be a reinforced field that can take repeat high speed robots slamming into it).

Usually this ends with a weighted table where we decide which of the three games we will be focusing on.

Once we have the concept of our game, we start developing it. We go over different mechanisms that we can add or remove from the game to make it better. Things that often get switched out and played around with are the end games, autonomous, and game pieces, until the we are happy with it. Sometimes this takes weeks, sometimes just hours.
Once we have that, we start to discuss the dynamics of the game and the basic rules ranging from the regular mandatory rules to the rules that protect the dynamics we want. In this stage we usually also make more changes to the elements of the game. We usually go to a public basketball court in the area and measure out distances, play around with locations of things and make sure everything makes sense. Then we CAD the field and continue to work on the rules we want.

This year the entire process above was done in the first weekend of work. After that there’s a lot of the little stuff like definitions, fixing contradictions, finding loopholes, balancing the game, deciding on score values for everything, assessing how hard it would be to referee each rule, etc.

We do a lot of research and polish work and we usually don’t finish the game until September. This year we were debating rule changes until 12 hours before kickoff.

I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone, but I thought it might be. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Niv
(Former Director of Project Falafel)

9

'nuff said.

Yeah, they can only WISH…

10

A couple videos that are relevant to this thread that many people may have not seen.

GDC 2010 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvyK2kbEgH4

This video series features Bill Miller and others talk a lot about how the GDC works and why their schedule has been pushed over the years. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZkCX6ThR8g&list=PL84A8233CD59DBFB7

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I still think they should have went with the PVC-catapult to return the soccer balls to the field :wink: :rolleyes:

12

I’d just love to be able to get some pictures or information about how a previous game was developed. It would be really entertaining to see how the design progressed. From the 2010 video, it looks like they prototyped bump crossing designs, and practiced the game. Do you think that the GDC built a climbing robot for testing this year? If so, was it faster than the cheesy poofs? Also, looking at more recent lists of GDC members, it looks like Woodie Flowers and Dave Lavery aren’t members anymore. When did this happen?

13

Offhand… Sometime around 2011, I think. (The reason I remember is a very memorable Lavery-esque question in the Q&A regarding welding on the minibots–and if he’d been on the GDC at the time, he wouldn’t have asked that. At least, I think it was him.)

14

Yes it was in 2011 here is a thread about it.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90538