Robot Grinder

We've all watched those fighting robots television shows, years ago. Usually, these fights pitted teams of engineers from different universities in arena matches against each other to see whose robot was the fiercest. The most popular shows were Battlebots and Robot Wars.

Here's an idea I pitched to my old employer, Airborne Mobile, for a fun, online cell phone game. The idea is to let the user create and customize his own robots and challenge other players asynchronously. The game has 3 easy steps:

• Build, Repair & Upgrade: Using an assortment of spare parts ranging from wheels, chassis, treads, arms, and weapons such as chainsaws, spikes and hammers, build, the player repairs and upgrades his army of robots. To ensure maximum replayability, all the different parts also exist in various different materials, from maleable copper to iron to durable titanium. Alternatively, robots could come in a limited amount of pre-designed templates, and the player could upgrade them individually, as shown below.
  

• Organize: Everytime the player builds, repairs, upgrades or buys a robot, he organizes them into squads. The typical squad has its strongest robots in front and weakest robots in the back. Each robot operates automatically and can be scripted by the player. An example for a script could be, everytime a robot is near an enemy robot, he smacks it with its hammer; if not, he moves in a random direction in search of an enemy robot. To avoid having a never-ending fight, there could be a turn limit.
  

• Challenge: Using an online match-making engine, the player is then offered a list of potential candidates to challenge. Once an opponent is chosen by the player, a challenge can be issued.
  

The fights do not take place in real time but rather asynchronously. The player who issues the challenge receives the fight's results immediately, whereas the other player only receives the results whenever he logs into the game. The result of the fight could also be sent via SMS message or email for an immediate response or a rematch. Whenever a player leaves the application, he can flag himself up for incoming challenges.

Each fight is crunched by a server, which sends the results to both players. The fights can also be replayed by the players so that they can tweak their robot setups accordingly for future challenges. Each fight is fought on a grid and each robot's actions logged, so the fights can be replayed using a standard, DVD-style interface (Rewind, Pause, Play, Fast-Forward).


These fights can be organized in tournaments and daily rankings, with the weekly winners receiving special prizes. The player can also practice against NPC robot armies to tweak his robot armies to perfection before challenging real players. The end result would be a highly addictive game, since players would have to log often to manage, maintain and upgrade their robots and issue challenges for a chance to win big prices and have their names in the weekly winners lists.