Challenge 8.5 -- The surprise office-crab challenge! Brian's Turn

I couldn't help but try this one myself...

To recap from Dan:

@deliciousbees of Harmonix posted this challenge recently on Twitter:

"My stress-induced insomnia is your gain. Best game pitch involving Opilio crabs in an office situation gets a RB Country Track Pack code."



Alright! My submission is an RTS called Inter-Cubicle Crab Apocalypse.
Each player playing starts with a human avatar and a cubicle in a cubicle-farm style office space, and a handful of crabs. The player's human avatar is much like the King in Chess-- a player loses when his human self is killed, and although it can be selected and moved like any other unit... it's best to keep him hidden away and walled up behind a line of defenses.

It turns out your defenses mainly consist of an army of Opilio crabs.
Things you can command your crabs do to are attack NPC humans 'creeps' to clear them out of their cubicles so you can claim them (the now empty cubicle) as your own, patrol areas or defend key units (a human avatar, traps, etc.), set up crab nests in empty cubicles to spawn more crabs, etc.

Crabs may also raid cubicles and supply closets for office equipment which can be used to equip crabs with various items like tape, scissors, staplers, etc. Many of these office supplies can be used as weapons --a scissors wielding crab can do more damage than a crab with no weapons-- but many of the items also allow crabs to build certain traps or defenses-- tape-wielding crabs can string reams of tape between cubicles to make a sticky web-like barrier that enemy crabs will get caught in. Scissor-weilding crabs are of course equipped with the tool that can defeat the tape webs, etc.

Crabs may also man certain large 'traps' found around the office-- dispensing coffee from the coffee machine as a sort of boiling-oil to burn crabs traveling below... dispensing water from the water-cooler to create a slippery spill... dispensing cans of soda from the soda machine that roll through the office causing damage as it runs over crabs. (Cans could then also be damaged to turn into a second type of explosive, fizzing, spraying weapon of carnage, and can be moved into strategic positions to use this as a trap-- set up some soda cans as a kind of explosive barrels to be hit with projectiles to explode when enemy crabs are near.)

Groups of crabs can also be used to do more complicated tasks:
-Infesting an empty cubicle with a crab-nest, and maintain the nest (some crabs have to stick around makin' crab babies...)
-Moving office furniture or large appliances (desks, photocopiers) around to use as barriers.
-Disassemble empty cubicles to use their walls as barricades or to expand your main cubicle-fort.
-Moving the large traps around to more strategic locations. (i.e. mount coffee machine traps on your fort so any crabs attempting to enter get scalded, etc.)
-Three crabs can equip a rubber band to form a catapault-- any equipment the loader crab is given is loaded into the rubber band and fired as a long distance projectile.
(Crabs can also be asked to load themselves into the rubber-band catapault as a means of troop transport!)

soda cans fired from the rubber-band-catapault would be like explosive mortar shells, etc.

This game would probably be a beast to balance, but sounds hilarious and could be a hell of a lot of fun.

Hmm... thinking about it, I think there's crabs in WarCraft3-- I could totally make this into an actual playable mod! Would take some heavy scripting work though, but meh.