RoboEngineers: the Filament Games VR robotics sandbox
RoboEngineers is an open-ended virtual reality sandbox from Filament Games in which players design, build and test robots. Filament's own blog says the name was the working title of the game that became RoboCo.
Updated
What RoboEngineers was
Filament Games named RoboEngineers as its entry in the Best Business-Developed Game category of the 2017 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge, where it was a finalist. The game is an immersive VR sandbox in which players design, build and test their own robots, intended as an inroad to robotics and mechanical engineering.
The loop imitates how project-based robotics and maker programs work: players form a hypothesis, build a robot, test it and iterate. Beyond free building, the game offers challenge courses that test whether a player can build to a specification. A course might ask for a robot that steers around stationary obstacles and then places a cube on a pressure plate, which calls for maneuverability and the ability to pick up, carry and set down objects. Filament describes this as an abstraction of engineering design: identify a problem, then engineer a solution for that problem.
The developers argued for two advantages. Against physical robotics programs, digital parts regenerate without limit, which lowers the cost of consumables over time, and prototypes can be taken apart without breakage. Against screen-based software, virtual reality adds embodiment and immersion and narrows the gap between the real activity and its virtual counterpart.
What is true today
RoboEngineers was an early working name. In a blog post dated November 7, 2022, Filament's vice president Brandon Pittser says the work began in 2016 and that a first phase, from April to July 2017, produced a VR robotics prototype for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, backed by a National Science Foundation small business grant. The team called it RoboEngineers, and the project later became RoboCo, which the post announced as available in Steam Early Access.
In November 2026 Filament's website lists RoboCo as a PC-first robotics sandbox where players assemble robots piece by piece with motors, gears and wireless controls and now script them in Python. The name RoboEngineers no longer appears on the page. Filament also lists a separate VR robotics game, Some Assembly Required, and a Roblox game called Robot World, made with FIRST Robotics. Filament presents itself on the site as an educational game developer, and the 2022 post noted that RoboCo was still unfinished at that point, with many features still to come.
Questions about RoboEngineers
What is RoboEngineers?
A virtual reality robotics sandbox from Filament Games in which players design, build and test robots and complete challenge courses that call for a robot built to a specification.
Did RoboEngineers become RoboCo?
Yes. Filament's 2022 blog post says RoboEngineers was the working name of the early VR version of the game that grew into RoboCo.
Where can the robotics game from Filament be found today?
On Filament's website, which lists RoboCo for PC, the VR game Some Assembly Required and the Roblox game Robot World.