Not to diminish the work of @adamjgray (your instructions look great!)… but we got a nice surprise this morning. The Build Instructions for both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 versions of Snapshot are now ready and available!
I also put together some renders of the Gen 2 version, to show some closer looks at each of the subsystems. Those can be found here.
Sorry for the radio silence on this. I was waiting for the instructions to be released to pull back the curtain on this process. (Shoutout @Jon_Jack)
In an ideal world, the hero robot instructions are released at the same time as the new game. However, the hero robots have honestly always been a secondary task for the GDC engineer. Their primary task (as expected) is to actually make the games and get product in our warehouses to ship to teams.
The hero robots typically don’t get started until after the new game elements and objects are designed, and somewhat “final”. Some of this is due to a lack of bandwidth, but a big factor is that this is the first time that the new game is stable enough to actually build a robot.
The problem is, this normally doesn’t happen until right around the time the GDC has their first meetings for the next game… Sending the GDC engineer right back into doing game engineering because they then have approximately 6 months to take two game concepts (some of which are loosely defined), prototype the game, and then make a field that is somewhat presentable to the powers that be.
Imagine designing a robot, only to find out that some element of the game is changing and now you have to redesign part of the robot. Then tack on some of the other “must haves” throughout the year that require some level of involvement from the GDC engineer(s) (ref training, game unveil, making sure new games arrive mostly on time, etc.), and you can see how easily it could be for delays like this to happen.
To make matters worse, once the hero robot is designed, it has to get modeled in CAD. Then we have to make instructions. With our current backlog of instructions, it’s not uncommon to take about 3 months to actually get a set of instructions finished. The hero robots also tend to be lower on the priority list since they don’t have a “hard” deadline like other projects our graphics team takes on.
All this being said, we understand the frustrations of these instructions releasing as late as they are, and we’ve taken some precautions to (hopefully) prevent this problem from happening again.
Our team is still hard at work developing the build instructions for the VRC Hero Robot (Disco), and we are looking to release those sometime within the next month or two. In the meantime, I also made renders of that robot, to give teams a better idea of how to build it. Those can be found here. If there’s anything that’s not clear, just let me know and I can create some additional images.
