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:

• 10,000,000+ Games Played
• 12,000+ Livestream Views
• 1,000+ Discord Members

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!

Rules 2.0​

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.

Updated Interface​

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.

TTLs!​

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.

New Pre-Update Hook​

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.

CLI Bug Fixes​

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.

Platinum Championship Tournament​

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.

Click to replay the final battle of the 2022 Fall League Platinum Tournament.

📺 Watch the Fall League Platinum Tournament Stream:​

Elite Championship Tournament​

The competition intensified on Saturday, November 12th when the top Battlesnakes of the Fall League gathered for the Elite championship.

Click to replay the final battle of the 2022 Fall League Elite Tournament.

📺 Watch the Fall League Elite Tournament Stream:​

Peoples Choice Award​

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.

📚 Learn more about Hovering Hobbs & developer coreyja:​

Big Thanks to our Partners​

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!

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

We want to support your awesome event​

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:

• A sponsorship of up to $2000 USD for food, venue, prizes, etc.
• Promo materials crafted by our Design Team (cards, posters, etc.)
• Battlesnake Team mentors to assist you on-site the day of your hackathon.
• Access to the Battlesnake Tournaments tool—makes managing participants and tournament results a breeze!

CHECK OUT THE CAMPUS TOUR​

Don't Qualify? Host Your Own Tournament Instead!​

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 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.

Account Dashboard​

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

Sneak Peak: Dark Mode!​

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!

Weekly Ladder Notifications​

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!

League UI/UX Updates​

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 🏆

Tournament Format​

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.

Tournament Schedule​

Platinum Quarterfinals: Wednesday, Nov 2 at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET

Platinum Finals: Thursday, Nov 3  at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET

• Streaming on twitch.tv/twilio

Elite Finals: Saturday, Nov 12 at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET

• Streaming on Twitch.TV/BattlesnakeOfficial

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.

Platinum Tournament​

Wednesday November 2 & Thursday November 3 at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET​

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! 🐍

Check out the Fall League Platinum Tournament Brackets​

The Fall League Platinum Tournament streams live on twitch.tv/twilio as part of the Twilio Signal Conference.

Elite Tournament​

Saturday, November 12th at 9am PT / 12pm ET​

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. 🐍

Check out the Fall League Elite Tournament Brackets​

The Fall League Elite Tournament will stream on twitch.tv/BattlesnakeOfficial

Thanks & See You Soon!​

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 👋

September was a big planning month for Battlesnake. We got the entire remote team together for an onsite to discuss roadmap and brainstorm plans for the 2023 Competitive Season. There are a lot of exciting things coming in the next 6 months!

Around all that planning,  we managed to get a few new features into the platform!

Community Challenge: Solo Maze​

Ever since coreyja created the Solo Maze Game Map we wanted to utilize it on the site and given that it was designed for a single Battlesnake, it made a lot of sense to make it our first Community Challenge.

You can now test your Battlesnake against 10 randomized mazes of increasing size and complexity. Your Battlesnake has 100 turns to find the food in the maze and then advance to the next level. Pass through all 10 levels of the Solo Maze to complete the challenge!

We hope to add more community challenges in the future. If you are interested in contributing your own challenge, you can pitch your concept on the Battlesnake Feedback Discussions.

Battlesnake Accomplishments​

We are experimenting with displaying a Battlesnake's performance in competitions  as a way to show a story of how a Battlesnake competes over time. To that end, you can now see your Battlesnake's accomplishments listed on the Battlesnake profile page.

The page now shows a breakdown of how your Battlesnake has done in each League, Tournament and Battlegrounds. In addition, we are showing streaks that your snake may have achieved in the Battlegrounds Standards and Duels ladders!

The feature is in a very alpha state at the moment and we are open to feedback!

Battlesnake Tournaments​

As more developers gain early access to the Battlesnake Tournaments feature, we are regularly adding quality of life improvements to make the process of creating and running tournaments that much easier.

My Tournaments​

We have made the tournaments you create easier to find by adding a new option to the navigation bar to provide quick access.

Also, the Competitions page was restructured to show your tournaments at the top, along side the leagues. It will also list the tournament that you are participating in that are being run by other organizers!

Tournament Testing​

There are a variety of ways to configure your tournament and sometimes organizers want to experiment with the settings before they commit to a plan for their custom competition. Unfortunately, testing is difficult without tournament participants so we added a new tool that will let you import a set of special test  Battlesnakes into your tournament. Now you can do some trial runs before inviting competitors to join!

If you are interested in running Battlesnake Tournaments for friends or colleagues  you can apply for early access.

That's all for now. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Battlesnake Discord server.