Alpha Cup Reflection — Regression Games
Hey everyone! This is Aaron, the founder and CEO of Regression Games. One of the core philosophies of Regression Games is to build with our players — we believe the best products are built with frequent feedback loops between our team and players. I wanted to share some of the learnings from our recent Alpha Cup tournament, sponsored by Steamship, where teams of bots in Minecraft competed in a capture the flag challenge.
If you missed the Alpha Cup finals, you can watch the highlights here!
Minecraft is an easy platform to build on top of, but isn’t for everyone
When we set out to create our first tournament, we chose Minecraft due to its popularity and ease of integration. With Minecraft’s modding community, we knew that developing a game mode on top of Minecraft, and essentially using it as a game engine, would allow us to reach players faster. With the Mineflayer framework, we also had a ready-to-go solution for having bots communicate with Minecraft.
Throughout the tournament, we learned a few surprising things:
- Despite its popularity, there are many people that have never bought Minecraft, or are unfamiliar with how the game works. This stopped some players from even getting started.
- Minecraft has lots of mechanics to think about when building strategies — 3D space, items, health, running/walking, damage modifiers, etc… which can increase the barrier to getting started with a bot
Overall, the players who were familiar with Minecraft and Mineflayer had a better time. The team is now spending time figuring out our next steps here — do we build on top of these game modes that require less Minecraft knowledge, or integrate into a new game? We have started experimenting with both of these approaches, with more on that to come soon!
Guides and the getting started flow are crucial to a fun experience
When the Alpha Cup started, the team created a small set of tutorials, guides, and templates for players to get going. We learned a lot from our players about what makes a good template or starting guide, which is a unique challenge since our player base spans from experienced programmers to those who are just beginning.
For example, we learned that while an event-driven system for programming bots is familiar to experienced programmers, new programmers and those used to other AI gaming competitions were confused by this setup. Once we provided more templates and features around turn/tick-based approaches, players seemed to have an easier time getting started.
Debugging, better typings, etc… there are so many topics I can go into around the developer experience, which is very exciting! The team is looking forward to improving the developer experience for the next tournament.
Our live events went very smoothly
The team was incredibly pleased with how smoothly the tournament went. Both the seeding tournament and finals encountered zero issues with running matches, updating leaderboards, etc… We couldn’t be happier with the results.
Testing and stability is a big part of the culture at Regression Games. Even with an extremely early product, we want to make sure everything works at all times. I think we can dive deeper into our approaches here in another blog post, but we look forward to using our learnings from running this tournament to ensure our future competitions go just as smoothly.
Additionally, players really enjoyed these live events — the finals stream, getting started stream, and developer QA sessions had engaged players who were curious to learn more about the tournament and strategies. We definitely want to plan more of these in the future!
Tournament timing is important
Another core piece of feedback we got from contestants was about the timing of the tournament. Considering our younger player base, many of our potential contestants had to deal with finals, new jobs, internship interviews, etc…
This has been a big point of discussion amongst the team — do we run a tournament once a month with a shorter duration? Do we run a tournament that is multiple months long? What about a hackathon? Do we work around common school schedules such as mid-terms and vacations? The team plans on experimenting first-hand with some of these ideas, to see what works best for our players.
What comes next?
We are extremely grateful to all the players that participated in the Alpha Cup and provided feedback about our platform in the alpha stage. We are more excited than ever for what comes next! We of course aim to hold another tournament soon, but we are still in the process of experimenting with game choice (Minecraft or something new?), the timing of the tournament, and the duration of the tournament. If you have feedback and opinions on this as a player, we want to hear from you! You can fill out this survey to let us know.
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Regression Games raises $4.2M for AI gaming and esports — Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat
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