Scalatron - a Scala bot programming game + tutorial

[Scalatron Botwar]

I wanted to let you know about Scalatron, a small open source project I put together as an educational resource for the Scala community.

It is based on a programming game for up to 20 players (which pits bots written in Scala against each other in a simulated environment) and a detailed, self-paced Scala tutorial. I created this to teach a few friends and colleagues (all Java programmers) about Scala. It was my attempt at the question "what is the quickest possible way to get a group of experienced programmers productive in Scala?".

It was designed as a substitute for PowerPoint for a six or seven hour training workshop for people that are completely new to Scala. An experienced group of Scala programmers, however, should have a server and bots up and running in about 30 minutes. The game rules are very simple but allow for pretty complex strategies. The workshop participants that have tried it so far had great fun, anyway. :-)

All the material is in the public domain and is available at http://scalatron.wordpress.com. You can follow the project on Twitter at @scalatron.

If this sounds interesting: download Scalatron, invite a few friends and start competing and hacking bots!

Feedback and suggestions are very welcome at scalatron at rocketmail.com.

  Greg

[Stan Campbell]

Jonas beat me to tweeting about this.. cursed timezones.. but cool stuff, Greg!

[Jean-Francois Im]

Pretty cool and very fun to look at too!

It would be even better if on page 4 of the game rules you'd mention
how much energy is consumed by mini-bots; right now it only says
"Unlike bots, mini-bots consume energy just to stay alive. When their
energy is used up, they disappear." and I had to dig through the
source code to know the energy drain is one unit per four turns.

I'll give it a whirl this week, it sounds really fun! :)

[Scalatron Botwar]

Thanks for the note!

The rate of energy drainage is a pretty important piece of information, and it is indeed one unit every four cycles, as you already found out.
I guess I wrote that part of the docs before I was sure what would be a good value. :-) That rate seems to work well, though.

Will be corrected in the next version.

> Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:10:54 -0400
> Subject: Re: [scala-language] Scalatron - a Scala bot programming game + tutorial
> From: jf...@jean-francois.im
> To: scala-l...@googlegroups.com