Battle Chips Beta

lol - that’s cool. Some good way to exchange bots is clearly needed - doing it as a grap with encoded data like a barcode or QR or such is just neat. :slight_smile:

@Bortels, I made the same robot as you… :). I called it Sentry… And noticed the same bug in Tourney mode, as if the bump chip had already been triggered once.

@Bortels & Fred-- I found it. The .bounds frame around robots wasn’t getting defined until after the first step, since they were all 0,0,0,0 the collision routine dutifully reported an overlap so every robot was starting with its bump sensor positive.

Ah hah! Thanks @Mark! I’m having fun with the random one, can make for some erratic movements!

0.40 now up.

Includes repeat chip, full screen tourneys, graphical changes, bug fixes, and a rough draft of the trading facility that will allow swapping robots as images.

http://devilstower.posterous.com/battle-chips-040

Getting better every time.

Tourney mode needs a button to end the current battle, but continue the tourney - in many of the matches, it’s clear they’ve reached a stalemate.

Re balance: I’m inclined to think the weapon fire is too “cheap” - a viable strategy is simply to rotate and fire like a madman, waiting for other bots to stumble into your line of fire. Likewise, moving when you aren’t taking fire is generally a mistake - its too easy to wander into a line of fire and get toasted. I’m thinking we need some sort of limiting factor - either a cooldown, or some small amount of damage you take when you fire, or ammo, or reducing range - something to emphasize looking and moving. also, maybe a “radar” that shows if you are facing a bot or the wall.

Example of a bot encoded as an image.

card

Trouble is, while I can easily push these out (to Dropbox) and I have the code to decode the image, I can’t think of how to allow the end user to import them.

You could use http.get to fetch them from a tweet, perhaps?

I’m not sure you need to - safari and email should both allow cut and paste to work to get them into a spritepack, no?

But yeah - http.get for ease. The problem is easy urls. If you ran your own server-side service it’d be easy. But then you have hosting and such. Github, perhaps, along with client-side caching (which is what I’m doing for my game). With github, people could push them to you…

Mmmmm… Thinking about it, really - the camera. Have one iPad display it, big, and take a picture with the other.

Yes, I just hand-waved away a ton of issues with orientation and registration. I’m like that.

@Bortels, it’s easy enough for me to get them into a sprite pack. Tougher to think how the player might handle it.

About the only solution I can think of that doesn’t involve typing out URLs is to set up a web site, and I don’t want to do that. I want the little graphics to be ubiquitous, something you could add to your email signature. But I’m lost on what happens from there. Someone sends you an email and within Battle Chips (not the Codea dev environment) you… What?

Ah - well, that makes it more open. Depends on how much non-codea you want to implement:

Bluetooth? A proximity thing could be cool.

I like decoding from the photo roll, or from the camera. If you go there, I’ll bet somewhere there’s a standard QR-code decoding library.

I wonder if that sort of data could come in a push notification…

register a “.battlechip” type with the ipad, then have URLs with that filetype open in Battlechips (like the .codea type opens in codea now?)

Consider NOT using a graphic, but an encoded text string - then use cut and paste.

The more I think about it, unless you do “take a picture to import”, the best bet is some sort of central website. That way instead of url, it could simply be the bot name. I know you don’t want that overhead, but a website would enable you to extend it in interesting ways, including win/loss tracking and a leaderboard.

@Mark I was thinking more along these lines:

You use Twitter’s API to download the json data for searching for the #battlechips tag. It gives you a bunch of tweets. You take the ones with image links and download the images. You present all the visual cards to the player so they can select the bot they want straight in the app.

how about apple’s game center? I’ve no idea how that works but seems like a natural place to share.

Also interested in this discussion as I’m thinking about how to allow people to create and share cargo-bot levels

The sort of experience I’d like to see would fall along these lines…

Export

User taps an item in the application to be exported and is given a choice of where to send it – Dropbox, Photo Library, Twitter (via Twitpics or equivalent) or email. It’s dispatched as an image or attached image, with appropriate name and metadata.

Import

User taps the import symbol or button in the app and is given a choice of sources: photo library, Dropbox, Twitter, or web site. Once that choice is made, they get a display of available images, touch the one they want, and it’s imported. Bonus points if the images can be filtered by properties such as name, width, or metadata.

I’m not thinking of this as a way to save actual Codea code, or elements to be used in building apps, but as a way to exchange information within Codea apps. Even a small image can encode a lot of info. Heck, I could actually encode all the properties of the bots in Battle Chips, program and all, into an image less than the size of one letter in this text.

This sort of design supports ubiquitous use of the images. It lets people attach a little stamp-sized image to an email just on the chance that one of the recipents might make use of it (like an IM to come look at someone’s Farmville farm, only less obnoxious). It would support web sites dedicated to such images, or casual transmission of a single image.

One problem with services like Twitpic is that it might be recompressed or resized. Lossy compression may be something good to deal with (e.g. something error correcting like a QR code for the data).

Had an idea about something not quite so combative. A long time ago, I was involved in a First Robotics competition where the robots had to gather boxes from the arena. This could be the goal of battle bots: to gather boxes scattered around the screen to their “home”. Firing at other bots could freeze them temporarily.

As it happens, the FIRST world championship was in St. Luois last week, about a block from where I stop to plug in my electric car. I got a chance to talk to some of the kids and show them battle chips.

The best idea I’ve had so far is to come up with a series of events: robo-skeet, maze navigation, tag…

@Mark, like an Olympics for robots, great!

And you have an electric car… Cooool. :slight_smile:

@Andrew_Stacey, nice idea for competitive resource gathering.

A question for folks here in beta land…

I do want to get Battle Chips in shape for the the app store, but I also realize that it’s several steps away from being ready. Proud as I am of the clean procedural drawings, they’re a long way short of professional quality artwork. I have to implement all the remaining tasks for the robots, which I believe I can handle, but building a mechanism to neatly save and trade bots may involve building a web site. Besides, if I’m really going to play developer, I’ll need a support site. The artwork and the web site are probably beyond me, at least in any reasonable period of time.

So here’s the question. Or rather, questions:

  1. is it reasonable to expend effort getting this to the app store?
  2. is it worth an investment of perhaps $10-20K in services to get there?
  3. what you think about taking this to Kickstarter? Would a movie of the current version be enough to gather some interest there? (I was thinking I could offer to name the built in robots after those who contribute funds.)
  4. IF this ever gets to the App Store… what should it sell for?

Thanks.