CombatRidge was the video game the Professor Richard Nelson's students played in The Cendovian to demonstrate their programming skills. While it was a very small portion of the overall story, it allowed the reader to watch key friendships form between young students working to hone their craft. More.
CombatRidge Teams
Leopards
For that final showdown, the three GodSlayers teamed up to form the Alpha Dogs to compete against Leopards. From left to right above are Lucas's Herculanix, Brittany's Athena, and Daniel's Drexosaur.
Nelson Trio
To help Marisa, Victor, and Connor train for their showdown with the Alpha Dogs, Richard and Richie worked together to create a special team of bots called the Nelson Trio. From left to right above, they are FullNelson, KingNelson, and HalfNelson.
PrivateJames
TinageWarrior
Marisol
BluManChu
DevilsKeeper
Herculanix
Borgana
Valkyrie
CodeSlayer
Drexosaur
Athena
KingNelson
FullNelson
HalfNelson
BinaryMessenger
CombatRidge Details
A hand-to-hand combat game designed to even the playing field between gamers and programmers, CombatRidge allowed them each to test their skills against each other. Players could play in traditional gamer-mode, controlling their characters directly during each match. Or they could play in god-mode, providing their characters with code that allowed them to operate autonomously during their battles.
Built to be fair, programmed fighters, known as bots, had no special powers. They were limited in the amount of computation and memory they could leverage to ensure they did not win just by thinking faster than their human gamer counterparts. For bots to defeat gamers, they had to be programmed to be smarter. The brute force approach often applied in many computer-versus-human challenges was removed from the equation. Therefore, the best coders would rise to the top, whether competing against other programmers or against gamers, only if they could prove to be wiser.
Godslayers
Richard taught his class that the best programmers could be so skilled at their crafts that their accomplishments could seem to outsiders like magic or the work of gods. Thus, he dubs the programming of bots as playing in god-mode. He brings in top-notch gamer students to compete against his programming students to put them to the test. Richard calls these gamers Godslayers and incentivizes them to defeat his students in order to discover which students are most worthy to enter the field of computer science.