Robot Battle (Macintosh game)

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Robot Battle

Developer(s)	Toby Smith
Publisher(s)	Blue Cow Software
Designer(s)	Toby Smith Charlie Moylan
Platform(s)	Mac OS
Release date	1991
Genre(s)	Programming game
Mode(s)	Single player

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Robot Battle is a programming game developed in 1991 by Blue Cow Software for the Apple Macintosh where players design and code adaptable battling robots. Its idea is similar to the newer Windows game of the same name. The concept of the game was invented by Toby Smith in a BASIC program "when people with 512K of RAM and two floppy drives were power-users", as he states in the game manual.

The game consists of a battleground and two robots. Before the game starts, each robot is preprogrammed using a BASIC-like language called RIPPLE ("Robot Instructional Programming Language"). 0–99 humans can also be placed into the battleground to throw the robots with hand grenades. The programs are checked for syntax and the game starts. The robot to survive the longer is the winner.

The RIPPLE language programs consist of logic commands, such as flow of control statements; and action commands, that actually make the robot perform an action, such as fire a weapon. To perform one action command takes the same time as to perform 99 logic commands.

An example RIPPLE program:

equip 1 1 0 0 0 435
LET h = 0
 
10 humanscan 0
20 IF range > 0 THEN GOSUB 1000
30 IF YCOORD < 8 THEN GOSUB 2000
40 swivel 10
50 GOTO 10
 
1000 zap
1010 zap
1020 RETURN
 
2000 IF HEADFACING > 315 THEN GOSUB 3000
IF HEADFACING < 45 THEN GOSUB 3000
RETURN
 
3000 IF h <> 1 THEN launch
IF h <> 1 THEN LET h = 1
RETURN