Regression Games Announces the Alpha Cup
Regression Games is thrilled to announce our very first tournament, the Alpha Cup, brought to you by Steamship! The tournament will run from March 11 to April 28, with $1500+ in prizes.
In this tournament, players will develop a team of bots to play a Capture the Flag game mode in Minecraft. Bots earn points by capturing the flag, scoring the flag in their base, and eliminating enemy bots.
Bots can be written in JavaScript, Python, or Typescript, using the Regression Games Bot SDK, which provides a variety of functions and utilities that let players focus on strategy and bot behavior.
Tournament Format
The tournament will take place over one and a half months, with a few weeks of bot development and practice being followed by a seeding tournament. This automated seeding stage will pit players against each other to seed teams into the final bracket. The finals will be single elimination, with each round being a best of 3 matchup between two teams. See the important dates sections below for the exact timeline of these stages of the tournament.
Prizes and Eligibility
See the official rules and eligibility here.
Everyone is eligible to participate in the tournament, but you must be above 13 years old, and only US-based teams will be eligible for the cash prizes. All players who participate will receive a badge on their profile with their final rank, and winners will receive an additional special edition badge for their achievement.
1st place: $1000 and a first place badge on their profile
2nd place: $500 and a second place badge on their profile
Steamship Sponsor Prize: $400 for the Most Creative Use of Steamship (includes additional sponsor badge as well). This may include generating back-and-forth chat with other players, smack talk, and just fun personalities for your bot (hint: design a prompt to say technical puns)!
Community Favorite: Community favorite badge — this will take place via a vote from the entire community
Important Dates
View the entire event calendar
March 11th — Alpha Cup Starts
March 25th — Alpha Cup Early Season Winner Announced
April 11th to April 17th — Seeding Stage Starts
April 24th — Finals Bracket Starts
April 28th — Top 8 Finals Stream
About the Game
The Capture the Flag game takes place on Arctic Algorithm Field. The map has a Blue Base and a Red Base, where teams spawn and return the flag for points.
Each team consists of three bots, which must work together to capture the white flag in the middle of the map. Teams score points by grabbing the flag, killing opponents, and scoring the flag. More specifically, the score values and win conditions are as follows:
- Killing a player on the opposing team awards 1 point to your team. If the killed player was carrying the flag, 3 points are awarded instead.
- 2 points are awarded for picking up a neutral or enemy-team flag.
- 10 points are awarded for capturing the flag.
- Win condition: The first team to reach 10 flag captures wins. If the match-time expires (limit at 10 minutes), then the team with the most captures wins. If both teams are tied for captures, then the team with the higher score wins.
During the course of the match, items will spawn at various item spawners on the map, located at the bases, middle of the map, and within the Sub Arctic Tunnel. These items include objects like potions, bows and arrows, swords, armor, and dirt blocks. Explore the map and develop strategies around its features to win!
For a full specification of the game, please see our Game Specification Document.
Why participate?
The Alpha Cup is an open tournament where players write the best code to earn ultimate glory. Coding tournaments provide a fun way to not only learn new concepts in coding and artificial intelligence but are also a great way to boost your resume, impress employers, and show off your coding skills. We have seen coding + gaming participants go on to work at impressive companies, using their wins in these tournaments as a way to progress their careers!
By participating in our first tournament and providing feedback on the experience, you can directly influence the development of our games and tournaments at Regression Games. Learning from our players is our number one priority of this tournament, and the team can’t wait to hear from you!
What is Regression Games?
Regression Games is building a platform that aims to make AI gaming as fun and exciting as possible, in a way that is open to the most people. Here are a few parts of our philosophy that sets us apart from the other AI competitions out there:
- We are focusing on fun and exciting gameplay
- We hope to be the platform most open to participation — rather than setting restrictions on who can compete, we believe everyone can participate, with different leagues and rankings available to give players of different skill levels a chance to thrive.
- Whether it be badges, achievements, or challenges, we aim to make year-round participation fun and engaging.
- We are not limited in our games — whether it be a 2D RTS game or card game, or our own games versus games that players already love, we want to keep the gameplay and game modes exciting and fresh.
- Content and competitions year round and often, instead of just annually or only a few times a year.
You can learn more about us from our Seed Round blog post: https://medium.com/ai-and-games-by-regression-games/announcing-regression-games-4-2m-seed-round-for-ai-gaming-nea-a16z-b12025a83e95
We’re excited for you all to join us in this first tournament!
— The Regression Games Team
Other announcements:
Regression Games raises $4.2M for AI gaming and esports — Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat
PRNewswire (Official Announcement)
Also be sure to follow us on our socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RegressionGG
Discord: https://discord.gg/925SYVse2H
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/regressiongames/
