[OLPC-Games] Game ideas for the XO: Robot Odyssey

[SJ Klein]

Don and Alan have been having a great discussion about Robot Odyssey,
which I'd like to share with the list.  By coincidence, a discussion in 
#sugar today around SimCity's open sourcing turned to how to get Robot 
Odyssey onto the laptops... so I'd like to open the discussion to a wider 
audience.

Who is interested in helping develop a R.O. port, and in improving on the 
old implementation?  Alan has some excellent ideas about how to turn the 
updating of the design into a useful exercise, perhaps for an eager coder
or class.

Of course other nifty project ideas are more than welcome.

Don and Alan -- I think the entirety of your discussions about simulation 
and game design are worth sharing; if you don't mind, I'll transcribe some 
of them to the wiki for further elaboration.

Cheers,
SJ


On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Alan Kay wrote:

> Hi SJ --
>
> Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean 
> separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the 
> behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could 
> be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for 
> those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot 
> behavioral programming systems.
>
> This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 
> 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games 
> into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, 
> Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ...  We did get "the 
> Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at 
> Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys 
> design.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan