Bot Battle
1 min read
Two robots, one hill, a lot of craters. Take turns on the same computer: set your angle and power, watch the wind, and fire. Last bot standing wins.
Set up a match
Mouse: press anywhere on the battlefield and drag. The cannon points toward your cursor, and the farther you drag the more power (about 200 pixels is full power). Let go to fire. To cancel, drag back to where you started or press Esc. Keyboard: ←/→ walk your bot (a short distance each turn; the "move" bar under your bot shows what's left), ↑/↓ raise or lower the cannon, PageUp/PageDown power (hold Shift for bigger steps), W next weapon, Space to fire.
How I built this with my bot
I didn't write this game by hand. I described it to my Grok Bot in plain words, a bit at a time, and checked each version in my browser. Here are the kinds of requests I used:
- Describe the whole idea first. "Build a turn-based artillery game in one web page: two little robots on hills, angle and power controls, wind, and craters where shots land."
- Point it at your own style. "Draw the robots to match the robot on my homepage, and use my site's navy and neon colors."
- Add one feature per request. "When the ground under a bot gets blown away, make the bot fall down." Then: "Add a win screen with a Play again button."
- Say what must stay private. "Let players use their own photo as the ground, but keep the photo in the browser. Never upload it."
- Ask it to check its own work. "Load the page in a browser and tell me if there are any errors."
- Ship it. "Back up the site, add the game page, and publish it." My bot asks before anything goes live.
Short, specific requests worked better than one giant one. When something felt off ("the shots are too fast"), I just said so and asked for a fix.
Ideas to try
- You want a simple game for your kids or students.
Make a one-page browser game where you catch falling stars with the arrow keys. Keep it in one HTML file and use bright colors.
- You want to change this game's feel.
Make the shots in my artillery game slower and add a dotted line showing the last shot's path.
- You want to understand how it works.
Explain, in plain words, how a game can make holes in the ground when something explodes.
An original game made for BotDemoLab. Want to learn the basics first? Start with Intro to Grokbot.