Now that we have seen the official FRC competition season come to a close, I wanted to create this well-deserved thread…
Whether this was your first FRC game or your 18th, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who didn’t enjoy Breakaway.
Breakaway was a HARD game - possessing soccer balls without carrying them, reliably traversing the bumps, kicking balls accurately over varying distances, and hanging a fully loaded robot above the ground are each very difficult technical tasks that in most years would be the game challenge. This year, we had all of them! Our team, and most others, were tested in ways unparalleled by other recent games.
Yet despite the complexity of the robot design, Breakaway was ingeniously simple. Three ways to score, each completely unambiguous. A zone system that required teams to constantly trade off the need to control the ball returns with the need to score offensive balls, and once the playoffs hit, the need to defend your opponents’ goals. All great sports are simple at their core, and yet fantastically nuanced so that no single strategy is always effective (as the finals on Einstein showed).
Although the game had its inevitable bumps - DOGMA, balancing winning with coopertition, balls that somehow always found their way into/under/on top of even the most cleverly designed robots - in my opinion, the GDC did an amazing job in creating a game that turned the past four months into “the hardest fun we’ll ever have”.
FIRST Community: Please do NOT use this thread as an opportunity to rip apart every little aspect of the game that you thought could have been better. There will be ample opportunity to do that before next January. The GDC is made up of humans - albeit very, very smart humans who have already demonstrated that they can see what works and what doesn’t. But as humans, they also deserve to hear our praise when they have earned it.
I have to say this year’s game was awesome. Einstein finals certainly proved how exciting this game really was. Props to the GDC, and I wish them the best of luck for next year’s water game.
I agree. I think Dean got his wish, an exciting game to watch. I was on the edge at the beginning of the season, but after watching a pre-season scrimmage and the first regional I was convinced this was a great game. Hands down the best game since Aim High!
Can’t wait for next year’s game presentation. Way to go GDC, keep up the good work.
I concur, I have to spend some time thinking but Breakaway is going to go pretty high on my list as far as FRC games. The GDC may have had some issues initially (ranking system and penalties) but they fixed them as soon as they realized them. Thank you GDC for practicing continuous improvement.
Thank you GDC for another wonderful tool to inspire students.
I’ll agree that there were some minor issues with the game, but Breakaway was very spectator friendly and a fun game to watch and scout. I too was very skeptical at first, but it became very fun and can’t wait for off-season.
The game was fun for teams to play and exciting for spectators to watch. Many matches were decided in the Finale by hanging robots. The game offered many strategies for teams to pursue. Although it might seem many robots looked alike, there were many designs implemented for drive, ball handling/kicking and hanging.
I personally spoke with Dave right before eliminations and outside after the event, personally thanking him for another great game challenge.
This was easily our toughest build season ever as we had to look at every aspect of meeting the challenge over and over again since many initial iterations of our bot failed.
My only suggestion is that game hints come out earlier and more descriptive such as actually showing the bump. It gives a chance to both teams and vendors to prototype and make things available early on with less stress on personal lives (families) where I think in the case of the bump, would not have hurt the game with teams finding out about it early on.
You know, some will say that this was a very hard and complicated game with complicated robots. Yet I took a picture of a very popular Einstein robot’s twin this weekend that not only did everything in the game very well, it also fit under 17" and had a very large gaping void in the middle of it. I took a picture through the robot.
The thing that I loved about this year’s game was that it was still very challenging, yet we weren’t forced to build something very complex to be very competitive.
It was a hard design challenge for everyone. The game objectives featured a very hard “required” element (ball control) that stumped even the most experienced veterans. On top of that, you had several choices, tradeoffs, and general conflicting goals in the game that made robot variety begin to kind of approach 2004 levels. 45 degree bumps, tunnels, hanging from a tower every which way… none of these were intuitive challenges to solve at all. It wasn’t an “arm game” nor a game where many pre-built mechanisms could just be plopped onto a new robot. Kickoff made me feel scared, worried, and as Woodie always put it, “made my brain hurt”.
I think the “easy enough for rookies, hard enough for veterans” sweet spot was found with this game. This is a game where every robot could score, and I would not be surprised if every robot did. Yet mastering the ability to score through defense, kick over bumps, traverse the bumps, and hang was not trivial for anyone; especially the former since it required possession. This year, defense was not a consolation prize for teams that did not do well on offense; it was something even storied veterans did. Good drivers could win with average robots, great robots fell to average drivers.
The actual game at a high level was also strategically very interesting, even before factoring in teams like 469. Autonomous placement, management of resources, and end game roles were more important than ever with the division of the field into zones. Where you put the alliance partner that couldn’t go over the bump, what autonomous routine to run, the tradeoffs of trying to starve a zone, and the places to apply defense were all very interesting. This was a game I could describe to stat junkies, sports nuts, and competitive game players alike and they would all be intrigued with the options teams had.
I’ll make a separate thread about the seeding system as my opinion in there is very different than most, and I don’t want to derail this thread.
In Kansas City, Week 1, Bill Miller said that this game was Woodie’s idea from a few years ago and they have been tweaking it and figuring out the nuances for a few years.
As the robots on Einstein elevated at the end of the game, I elevated out of my seat. If the GDC was hoping for the thrill of a sporting event, they nailed it with this game.
Jared, I hope my post is not a bash. If it is, please tell me and I’ll remove it. This is a thought I have had ever since Kick Off and a lot of it is based on some threads and posts here in CD as well as some initial responses I received from my teammates.
I think that folks were slow to absorb and understand the power and the beauty of the scoring system this year. Many of us seemed caught up in how it should be and didn’t take the time to think about how it could be. As we moved through the competitions and people started becoming more open to the possibilities, then the game was able to be played out with everyone celebrating it. I also think that hints and clues continued to reveal themselves although people didn’t quite get them or verbalize them - such as soccer being a low scoring game. That doesn’t make it a boring game - it makes it soccer. If we want to watch/play a fast paced high scoring game, we watch/play basketball. If we want to watch/play a game with extra innings with the short stop pitching in 2 of those innings, then we watch or play like the Cards and the Mets! err - baseball.
I think that staying flexible, agile, and open in our thinking and approach to new games will be vital in the successes of the coming seasons. Strategy was such an important element of the game and the robot design. It always is but I really saw it shine this season. It was wonderful!
Being a rookie driver this year was extremely difficult. Although for me, I LOVED every second of it. The game was so simplistic and easy to score on. Nothing too techinal about the game or the rules. I know our team was dissappointed about soccer balls being used but it wasn’t truly that bad after all. Next year is my senior year and my last year driving. I know that I want the game to be amazing. Also, the game has to be challenging for me as well. I know the GDC can blow us or should I say “break” us away next year with the new game. Now for us, it’s the off-season!
As a strategist this was my favorite game from all of the ones I have seen. Never has strategy on a match to match basis and during alliance selections been so important especially at the championship. You had to consider who could play which zone, where people would line up, and where all the balls would be at the end of autonomous mode.
I really have to echo everything that all of you have said thus far. The FRC GDC did a great job creating a game that everyone was competitive in. Keep up the good work!
I also really have to through some props towards the FTC GDC. They created a game that similar to that of Breakaway in that it was exciting for spectators and just as much fun for teams to build robots for.
I very much enjoyed the game this year, and would also like to thank the GDC! I think they set the bar high, with several tasks that robots could preform that teams had to decide which one they wanted to do in the very beginning of the design process! (I’m referring to moving, which should always be a/the top goal of a robot, and the decision to move over bumps or though tunnels or none at all) The game was relatable for spectators, fast paced, with so many robots moving between zones and scoring, the low scoring kept things close and kept everyone on the edge of their seats until the very end, and once we got to the very end, robots pulled themselves up into the air, what a great crowd pleaser!
On the other aspect I deal with, it also made a challenge for scouting. Sure, we still needed to figure out who scored the most and maybe who moved the most, but you needed people that could work well and compliment your robot, unlike in Lunacy where you just got the two highest scorers. No longer was alliance selection so easy for the unprepared teams, and the prepared ones collected their reward for their hard work though both quantitative and qualitative data, both of which I feel was needed more for this game then last year.
Not to be “that guy”, but I just want to mention the camera situation. One thing I remember Dean saying at Kickoff is, “We think we have it this time.” and that cameras would be used more in the games to track the giant vision targets and score balls. Now, from my viewing, I didn’t see a single team use a camera to track and score balls. I know back at our shop, we had a test robot that we planned on having an autonomous program that would use the vision target to score balls, but we had issues with the lighting providing a false target. We got rid of the idea completely after we came to the conclusion that with teams flying over bumps, we’d get way too shaky of an image to be able to do anything with (which I find funny, because we didn’t even end up going over the bumps). Just something to look at for next year’s game, if they want to keep pushing the cameras, something I personally feel is very beneficial.
This game gets a big thumbs up from me. I am always critical of the games on these forums, mostly because I bring a LOT of non-FIRSTers to watch events and I always ask them what they think of the game. This year’s game was the best feeback I’ve received in many years.
Of everything in the game, I have one minor criticism - but I’ll save that for another thread.
I really want to give a big thank you to the GDC. I think Breakaway is a TV-ready game, which is exactly what FIRST needs. Bravo.
I think Breakaway was a great game, especially to introduce new people into FIRST. I brought someone with me who wanted to join a robotics team next year to the Troy competition to show him what it was like, and after a brief description of the game to him, he picked up practically everything else without much help. The understanding of the competition actually increased his interest in joining FIRST, and I was pleasantly surprised when he wanted to stay to see the final matches. Good job GDC!
Breakaway was also an exceptionally great spectator game, and I kept finding myself staying in the stands just to watch the matches that didn’t even have well-renowned robots in it. In my opinion, 2008 and 2009’s games were pretty boring to watch in comparison to this year’s game.
I look forward to when the next year’s game is announced!
