Once upon a time, in the dim mists of prehistory, there was an Apple II game by Silas Marner called RobotWar, in which you programmed a robot warrior to fight AI bots, using a programming language quite similar to Apple Basic. The basic gameplay became C Robots, in which you code your bots in, naturally, C. Since then, there's been a whole geeky subculture of bot-coding games -- but since to code you need to be, well, a coder, the audience is inherently limited.
Spuds is, fundamentally, an attempt to take the RobotWar dyanamic, replace coding with a GUI to shape behavioral routines for your robots, and bolt on a single-player, level-based game that poses challenges of increasing difficulty, requiring you to develop new bot routines to address them. (You can also host a multiplayer game.)
As with other games of the type, once a level start, you simply watch the action and see how well your bots perform, given their instructions; if you fail, you go back, and either purchase a different set of bots, or refine your programming to deal with the challenges of the level.
It's a 3D, but fairly low-poly game; "Spud" stands for Synthetic Pattern-matching Universal Defenders, and while they don't look like potatoes, they're simple models in a cute kind of way. On the whole, it's quite engaging, and the intellectual challenge held my interest for several dozen levels, which is saying something given the limits on my time at present.
The game is not without flaw; half or more of the levels are training sessions, with text introducing some new aspect of the programming interface, and it's sometimes frustrating that you'll go through several fairly tedious such levels before getting to one that matters. Or to put it another way, while the tutorial system does a good job at training you, it's also not the most polished or entertaining tutorial you've ever encountered.
Still, it's innovative, and a nice effort for a low-budget indie title. What's on offer at the moment is billed as a demo (though it has enough levels to keep you occupied for quite some time), with the commercial version apparently to come later.
Very short demo, very promising future
I played through the demo in less than an hour, but definitely enjoyed it and look forward to the full version.
The main things that it's lacking -- a way for SPUDs to recognize friendly as well as unfriendly SPUDs to allow squad-based maneuver, some sort of system for defining groups of objects (so that "hide behind trees" and "hide behind rocks" could be the same "hide behind cover" pattern) -- are probably exactly the sort of things that will appear in the full version.
Released!
Spuds seems to have been released today; anyone else who was waiting with bated breath for this one can go snag it now.