Has anyone ever played Robot Odyssey? It was one of most beloved games as a child. It's somewhat of a precursor to this project.
Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#32Shame about the loot boxes.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#33Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#34Cool, a modern day Core War! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
Came here to make the same comment.
I also played - I guess back in the late 90's, with an autonomous Asteroids-like game where you'd write code to control your "space ship" that had "radar" to show you nearby opponents and had pretty much just Asteroid-like controls, which ran as a networked screensaver. It came out of a bunch of people working at Canon - a friend of mine worked there writing printer drivers...)
(Now I'm wondering what you'd get if you let loose inside a modern device, like a cellphone for example, with two opposing bits of fighting code with full root access, but strictly equally time and resource shared? Would Core War even make sense any more with Gigs of ram, hundreds of gigs of flash, asnf stuff like wifi and bluetooth?)
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#35Hey all, I've been working full-time on a game called Bot Land for the last four years, and it just launched: https://bot.land/ In the game, you can make bots with a Scratch-like interface called Blockly or use a subset of JavaScript. Either way, bots are fully automated. Here are some screenshots of the game: https://imgur.com/a/Rs2OWFg Almost all of the development process (~5000 hours) was streamed live on Twitch:…
Congrats, Adam! I've been following your stream for years, and I'm always impressed and inspired by your programmers' log and note taking.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you have the videos unlisted? This is amazing, congrats.
> Why do you have the videos unlisted? Two reasons: 1. By making them public, they show up for all of my subscribers on YouTube, but I assume most subscribers on YouTube want to watch "major" update videos like announcements, recaps, etc. 2. I didn't want a new person coming to the channel to get lost in the ~800 development videos rather than seeing the important ones. > This is amazing, congrats. Thank you! It's su…
What about the two channel system that is so common on youtube? One for major productions, the other for faster-release-but-narrow-appeal videos like behind the scenes or development progress? That way super fans can follow the bonus channel without having to go through your website to find videos.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#37Shame about the loot boxes. https://i.imgur.com/NvQIJaG.png
Are you talking about the monetization model, or is something broken with opening salvage packs?
I assume the former. The goal was always for Bot Land to be free-to-play, and there were many different approaches to monetization discussed throughout development. In the end, I settled on the one you see in-game now, but the tenets were always the same: https://share.bot.land/monetization.html
For reference, salvage packs are the single monetization point of Bot Land. I'm not planning to include advertisements, and I don't want to do subscriptions or anything. Salvage packs contain only cosmetic items, and the rarities are included up-front (which I would have done even if certain platforms like Apple didn't require that).
You can play for free and obtain every item in the game. The game took not only a substantial amount of time to develop (4 years), but also a huge chunk of my savings that I'd built up from my past jobs. I do need some way to make money, and I don't think people would give a game like Bot Land a shot if it weren't free.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do you have the videos unlisted? Two reasons: 1. By making them public, they show up for all of my subscribers on YouTube, but I assume most subscribers on YouTube want to watch "major" update videos like announcements, recaps, etc. 2. I didn't want a new person coming to the channel to get lost in the ~800 development videos rather than seeing the important ones. > This is amazing, congrats. Thank you! It's su…
What about the two channel system that is so common on youtube? One for major productions, the other for faster-release-but-narrow-appeal videos like behind the scenes or development progress? That way super fans can follow the bonus channel without having to go through your website to find videos.
That probably could have worked, although I don't think I was the best at advertising things. :( As a streamer, I felt like one of the most difficult things to do was to alert people about news/changes for basically anything (my vacation schedule, a bug, the current task I was working on, etc.).
Now that the game has launched and my streaming schedule is up in the air, I don't know if I'll be changing anything with the YouTube channel. It's been around for so long now, and I don't think many people want to watch the past VODs anyway beyond skimming to see what's changed in that amount of time.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#39Shame about the loot boxes. https://i.imgur.com/NvQIJaG.png
They have to make money somehow. With a free to play game there aren't that many working monetization strategies to choose from.
Re: Show HN: Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
#40Full on programming as a mechanic seems overwhelming, but I like the idea of automation in strategy games I’ll give your game a try, maybe I’ll be proved wrong
There are three levels of scripting you can do: * None - just ignore the scripting and let the default AI take care of everything. There are some items that can't be used this way, e.g. Teleport and EMP, because the default AI wouldn't know how you'd want to use them. * Blockly - use the block-based scripting to control your bots. This is what I suggest as the step for newcomers who still want to customize their bots…
Blockly (or similar methods like Blueprints in Unreal & Simulink) is how most people will program in the future.
You’re going to get negativity from “developers” about using Blockly, but unless they’re your target audience don’t let it get to you.
Lots of EE’s use graphical tools to layout the circuit boards anyway... so text is really just an unnecessary abstraction over schematics & you’re bringing programming back to its roots :-)