Roomba Gladiators

Let me start by answering the first thing that comes to peoples minds when I tell them I want my Roombas to fight.  “So you’ve got controllers for them?”

No.  No I don’t have controllers for them.  More accurately I have heaps of controllers for them and I could build them to work anyway you want.  But no, I won’t be attaching controllers for this first combat run.  Why?  I’ll tell you why.

Because the above will be the base model.  The sedan and everyday driver of today’s killing robot.  3 balloons for 3 lives and 2 pins for 2 spiked horns.  They’ll be boxed into a small arena and we just hit the clean cycle.  That sounds boring to you?  Ok, let me make this interesting.

Wait what?  Does that one in the back there have 4 balloons?  Yeah it does.  If you win round 1 in the playoffs you get one point to spend on upgrades.  In this case, the yellow ballooned Roomba opted for the extra life when he goes into the next round.  But what about the blue guy, why doesn’t he have any extra balloons?  If this is playoff style combat then in round 2 the yellow guy should be playing against a winner as well.  Yeah, they both won their respective matches, but the blue guy was saving his upgrade points.  Why?

That’s right! If you have 2 points to spend (e.g. you’ve won 2 rounds already and saved your points) you can get fire upgrades.  These don’t need to poke front on into a balloon to pop it, only get near it!  But it runs the risk of burning out before the match is over and you’re a sitting duck.  Does that say….are those birthday candles!?

Yes they are.  Happy Birthday you beautiful robot murder machine!  Okay so how far does this go?  Well potentially if you win about 4 or 5 rounds it starts looking like this.

That’s 4 lives, 3 pins, 2 flame weapons.

The last thing to test is the fire upgrade to see if it is in fact useful as I suspect, which I’ll do tomorrow.  So that’s almost it.  Now I just need to choose my stream technology and work out how many rounds I can fit in a day at work and thus players.  Each player uses one of the 2 robots but kits it out with their weapons etc. when their fight is on.

Almost there.  2 or 3 weeks tops for the first official fight.