There are actually thousands of these types of project, almost all abandoned. One of the longest lived, and perhaps not coincidentally the simplest, is Core Wa

There are actually thousands of these types of project, almost all abandoned. One of the longest lived, and perhaps not coincidentally the simplest, is Core Wars. I started working on something very similar to what you describe a few months ago because it's a fantastic idea that I don't think has been implemented well in a while. It was Java-based but the idea was that you had a team of robots with 64k RAM and a simple CPU. You could configure robots with different types of equipment, (radios, weapons, sensors, etc.) that would be mapped to memory locations for control. To play you'd write an assembly-language program to control the robot and set it loose on the world. You could write compilers and such to compile down to the robot machine language if you wanted to get sophisticated. Each "round" would consist of running one machine cycle for every robot in the world. The problem I ran into, other than not having enough time to work on it, was that you could really go down the rabbit hole on "realism." For example, the radios; should I implement actual antenna propagation patterns and delays, or should a transmission just be instantaneous and recievable everywhere? There's a tradeoff between realism and fun, and between limitations of the world and longevity. If you make it too limited, you end up with gameplay that essentially favors a single strategy. If it's too complex, only the most hardcore players will put in the effort to play. I think this is a fundamental problem with a game like this. Maybe something like this would be fun and accessible if you eliminated the competitive aspect of it. Edit: if you decide to pursue this project and want some (intermittent) help, send me an email at [my username]@gmail.com