Game Design
What was the purpose of our project? Well, we wanted robots which could interact with people and bring joy to them. Because of that, the way in which the robots interact with people was really important.
It being important made it so that we sort of put things off until we knew more about the robots and what we could do. There were times however, where we gave ourselves deadlines for deciding things, because it affected what we would do immediately next.
The gameplay started as an idea- completely different than it is now- which inspired what are project would be. We had initially imagined some sort of sumo-wrestling match. Robots would battle each other in the same way humans, or BattleBots do.
Before our Sprint 1 Review, we had an ideating session. We all came to the session with a bunch of ideas in our heads and drawn out on scrap paper. Then, we went around the table and we each said what our ideas were. Here's a list of our ideas :
- Sumo Wrestling
- Racing, where you build your own track
- Freestyle mode
- Laser Tag
- Bucket Ball (Hungry Hungry Hippos)
- Nerf War (or Silly String War)
We found that our ideas had some overlap - we were on the same page about some things, which was great!
We wrote a list of our ideas on the board and then each person went up to the board with a marker and gave a check mark to their top two favorite games. We then modified the games we liked and made a new list. These games were:
Even though we thought all these games were interesting, we gave the final word to other people, people who would potentially play with our robots. At our first Sprint Review, we asked our peers who were listening to our presentation to fill
out a survey about what times of robot games they would prefer and about their stance on robots and robot games. We also sent this survey out to the Olin student population, through a student mailing list called Carpe Diem.
The votes were in and laser tag won by a landslide !
We knew then that we had to do some laser tag related game, but we would flush out the details about the game later.
Deciding on a Robot Aesthetic
We all had wanted to make robots that were bio-inspired. Bio-inspired robots are cute, which would go along with our aesthetic goals, and they are relatable. People automatically associate different traits to different animals, which makes it easier to give robots personality.
Our process for deciding on a robot aesthetic was similar to our process for deciding on a game. We held another ideation session, to which we all came with sketches on paper and even more elaborate designs in our heads. We went around the table and shared our designs. Then we took markers to a whiteboard where we've documented all our ideas and marked our top two favorites.
Our top choices were : bee , dragon, armadillo, hedgehog. And we decided to make them in that order.
Actually building the robots prompted us to flush out more details about the game design.
Game Play
The specifics about the game play took longer to decide on because we didn't want to make any final decisions. We brought together the specifics of the gameplay eventually. The specifics actually helped us in building the robot. By writing and finishing the game play, we worked out how points would be counted and how the robot would be set. This physically presented itself on the robot with the buttons which we put on to turn the robots on and off.
A link to our Game Instructions document can be found here
