I've got to say, I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it went adding bots to KarBOOM. If you haven't read the news yet (or you're really quick and you're reading this before IndieDB has made it available), KarBOOM 0.1.4 is out now. Get it on the downloads page if it's ready, or at KarBOOM's website, which always has the latest version of KarBOOM pretty much as soon as I finish it.
I was having a little trouble getting the bots to be intelligent about avoiding the boundaries of the level, but in the end I didn't need to at all. You see, a few years ago in my first semester of university in Australia, we had a task to build and program Lego robots to fight each other in a ring. The ring was marked with black tape on a white board, so every robot took advantage of light sensors to see where the boundary was and stay away from the edge. Every robot except ours, that is.
Why complicate things with a light sensor? We could always be sure that unless the round is over there were no boundaries between one robot and another. All our robot had to do was spin until it saw something with its sonar, and then charge ahead as fast as it could. It came second in the tournament.
The bots in KarBOOM have a similar strategy. Being cars, they can't spin on the spot. But as long as they know how to make a three-point turn and can tell where their opponents are, these cars almost never find themselves outside the ring unless forced by another car.
Also, at time of writing, there's still time for phase 1 of the voting for Indie Of The Year. You can vote for as many games as you want, so if you like KarBOOM please support it with a vote. I'm by no means expecting (or even hoping for) actually obtaining the first-place title of Indie Of The Year with the likes of Minecraft out there -- and Minecraft well and truly deserves it. But the ranks of the top 100 are published, and the top 50 get considered for other honours besides Indie Of The Year, so a vote is a great way to show your support.
