I have been hoping to find a multiplayer coding game to play with my FIRST students during this time. Googling "multiplayer coding game" yields many results, but none of the ones I have tried so far have been satisfactory. Ideally it would be more of a sandbox than a game, with little robots you can control.
It includes both "hardware design" and programming. Hardware design in the form of balancing power usage vs capability. A big honking amount of solar panels is convenient, but then the mass of your grobot increases and you need a bigger more power hungry engine too. Software design in the form of a small but very capable stack based language.
One of the fun parts about grobots is you get more than one robot and cooperation between your robots is pretty important! There's a fair few published robots, ranging from simple algea-tactics (Just sit there and photosynthize) to bee-like swarms with workers and queens to stationary robots with big cannons that depend on a small and nimble scout to pick out targets at a distance.
Probably not what you're looking for, but pretty interesting. TwoSigma has the Halite AI challenge where people submit competitive bots[0]. I've wondered if you can spin up your own server and just compete with friends
Would appreciate any recommendations.