Hey Team! 👋
This is Corey, you may know me as coreyja from Battlesnake, Youtube, or Github.
I've been playing Battlesnake since 2021 and been on the Core Team since 2023 when Battlesnake was given back to the community.
Today I'm happy to share that I'm stepping in to run the Battlesnake infrastructure going forward. The play.battlesnake.com experience isn't changing in the immediate future, but I am planning to bring back things like Single Player mode and Custom Tournaments!
TL;DR - Please consider sponsoring Battlesnake on GitHub to keep us operational throughout 2024!
A lot has happened in 2023, and I wanted to take a moment to discuss some important changes for next year.
Earlier this year our team joined DevCycle, and as a result, we stopped working on Battlesnake full-time. This significantly impacted our ability to produce seasonal leagues and other fun content. It was a good thing, in that we've had to focus on what makes Battlesnake most exciting, but also stressful since we weren't sure how the community would react (spoiler: y’all stuck with us 💃).
Since then, Chris, Kerri, myself, and a few core community members (thanks Rob, Andrew, Corey, Joe, Aileen, and Xtagon!) have kept Battlesnake operational while DevCycle paid our bills. It’s been convenient, but also not ideal, and a few months ago I decided to make a big change.
Today we’re annoucning that the Battlesnake team is joining DevCycle, a leading feature management company helping talented teams build great software. Combined, we’ll be able to support developers from all experiences and backgrounds in becoming better programmers and delivering amazing products worldwide.
We're thrilled to finally be sharing the exciting changes we’ve made to Battlesnake including our website’s new look, new player ranking system, and a new way to compete!
Hello Battlesnake Developers,
With the end of the year fast approaching, we wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for being a part of our community this year.
Here are a few highlights made possible thanks to your support in 2022:
And, of course, we were thrilled this past weekend to induct the first seven legendary Battlesnake Developers into the Hall of Fame.
We are so grateful to have such a dedicated global community of developers who play Battlesnake, and we hope that you all have a safe and happy holiday season.
See you in 2023! Andrew, Taraneh, Darcy, Sherri, Rob, Aurora, Chris, and Brad
🎁
P.S. There's still time to complete our Annual Developer Survey and get your hands on the limited-edition goldfish head customization (Survey closes Dec 31st at 11:59PM so don't miss the chance!) 🐟
As Fall League finished up, the team was heads down working on infrastructure, with the biggest changes coming in the form of the new Rules 2.0 release!
We did a big cleanup of the Rules project in November with the goal of making a 2.0 release. The goal of this cleanup was to remove a lot of legacy code and rework how the rulesets and maps work to make things a bit more intuitive. Although there are quite a few changes to the package's API, we ended up releasing this version as rules 1.2.0instead, because of some awkward requirements around Go packaging.
The previous interface was a bit of a mess handling legacy support for the dedicated Ruleset types along with the newer pipeline approach. Rob went in and removed all the legacy interfaces and settings arguments and built out a simpler, unified ruleset interface along with a variety of easy to use helpers. These new helpers make it much easier to create new rulesets and GameMaps.
We have added new internal fields for storing Time To Live values for food and hazards, along with generic storage data for maps. This provides a variety of new ways to power interesting Game Map functionality.
We worked with experienced Battlesnake Developers, JonathanArns and coreyja, to add a new hook to the GameMap system to allow for board evaluation before the update step of the workflow runs. The new hook allows for new ways to manipulate state within a GameMap for more advanced map implementations.
We fixed a bug where the body of the last request (i.e. the /end request) wasn't being logged in the output file by the CLI.
You can check out all the code changes in the Release Notes.
That's all for now. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Battlesnake Discord server.
With the dust still settling from the penultimate competition of the 2022 Battlesnake Competitive season, we are thrilled to share the final standings from the Fall League Platinum and Elite Tournaments.
An incredible 32 Battlesnake's qualified for the 2022 Fall League Platinum Tournament which took place over two days at the Twilio Signal Conference onNovember2nd and 3rd****. You can catch it here.
Congratulations to Master Chief by master-coder, our 2022 Fall League Platinum champion! 🥇
Click to replay the final battle of the 2022 Fall League Platinum Tournament.
The competition intensified on Saturday, November 12th when the top Battlesnakes of the Fall League gathered for the Elite championship.
Congratulations to soma-mini v1[fall]31by pedrosorio, our 2022 Fall League Elite champion! 🥇
Click to replay the final battle of the 2022 Fall League Elite Tournament.
After a tight race between some big fan favorites this fall, it came down to only 4 cheers to crown the 2022 Fall League Peoples Choice Winner.
Congratulations to Hovering Hobbs by coreyja, our 2022 Fall League Peoples Choice Winner! 👏
Our wonderful partners are what makes Battlesnake possible. A big thanks goes out to DigitalOcean, Twilio, New Relic, and RBC for their continued support!
Ready for more live Battlesnake action? You won't have to wait long! The Winter Championship streams on December 17th at 9am PT / 12pm ET 🐍
If you've ever wanted to host a Battlesnake hackathon at your North American college or university, there has never been a better time!
We're sponsoring student Battlesnake hackathons!
The Battlesnake Campus Tour is a hackathon sponsorship with a twist. Recipients will receive up to $2000 USD in funding, prizes, tools, mentors, and more.
Campus Tour sponsorship includes a ton of great benefits including mentors from Battlesnake
The Campus Tour is open to anyone looking to run a hackathon for students at the college and university level in North America and includes:
If you don't fall into the perfect candidate for the Campus Tour, you can still request access to the Tournaments Tool. It handles registration, scoring, brackets, and allows you to run matches with just a few clicks! Request access.
The deadline to apply for winter/spring semester is November 30, so don't delay!
The team spent most of October running Fall League and working on some major new updates for the 2023 Competitive season that will be announced in December and January. Despite that we managed to get a few new improvements out for the platform.
The new Account Dashboard is very close to an alpha release, which will likely go live in November. This new interface will serve to guide you along your Battlesnake journey, informing you of ongoing events, recent stats, and suggestions for what to try next.
The team will be iterating on the dashboard regularly over the coming months, adding components to give developers quick insight into how their Battlesnakes are performing. You can check it out for yourself by going to https://play.battlesnake.com/account/dashboard
We are actively replacing a lot of old infrastructure with a whole new UI/UX system on the Battlesnake platform. This will help us make the experience more consistent through our feature set and support things like dark mode!
In October we introduced new email notifications that summarize how your Battlesnake did over the last week in a league qualification ladder. This is the first in a set of new features we are implementing to give Battlesnake Developers more insight into how their Battlesnakes are performing on the platform. We hope to add more stats as well as some on-demand data that users can interact with in the future.
In addition, we are building out notifications around tournaments to keep everyone up to date on how league tournaments progress, from qualifications to results. The first of these emails will be sent out when the Fall League Platinum tournament completes on November 3rd!
The League Dashboards have got some upgrades! The elite and platinum qualification banners are now back on the leaderboard to help you quickly determine which Battlesnakes are opposing your entry to the tournament!
Speaking of tournaments we have made a long requested update to the tournament brackets. You can now click on the trophy icons on the brackets to review the game associated with that win. This lets developers easily review games in the context of the tournament!
That's all for now. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Battlesnake Discord server.
With the Fall League leaderboard officially closed, let’s take a look at the top-tier Battlesnakes who qualified for the live tournaments streaming on Twitch on November 2nd, 3rd and 12th 🏆
We're doing something different this year, the Platinum Tournament will be streamed live at Twilio Signal 2022 Developer Conference across two days! Our talented team of shoutcasters will deliver exciting play-by-plays of the action.
Platinum Quarterfinals: Wednesday, Nov 2 at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET
Platinum Finals: Thursday, Nov 3 at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET
Elite Finals: Saturday, Nov 12 at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET
In these tournaments, 2 wins are required to move onto the next stage right up until the finals, where it will be a race to 3 wins to determine who will be crowned as the Tournament Champion.
An incredible 16 Battlesnake's qualified in the Platinum tier of the 2022 Fall League Tournament which will take place on November 2nd and 3rd streaming live during the Twilio Signal 2022 Developer Conference! 🐍
The Fall League Platinum Tournament streams live on twitch.tv/twilio as part of the Twilio Signal Conference.
With fierce competition throughout, 16 of this season's best Battlesnakes qualified for the 2022 Fall League Elite Tournament which will stream live on the Battlesnake Official Twitch Channel on November 12th. 🐍
The Fall League Elite Tournament will stream on twitch.tv/BattlesnakeOfficial
Before we close, we want to thank all of the Fall League competitors, both those who qualified and those who didn't make it to the tournament 🙏
We'd also like to send a big shoutout to our amazing community and our wonderful 2022 partners at RBC, New Relic, DigitalOcean and Twilio who help to make these spectacular competitions possible ❤️
See you at Twilio Signal and on the Battlesnake Official Twitch Channel this November 👋