Battlesnake Developer Update — April 2021
April saw the end of Spring League and the first event of the 2021 Battlesnake Competitive Season. On the development side a lot of work went into support the event and the two great tournaments that closed down Spring League. Before Summer League starts, we are focusing on a variety of system improvements to make the platform easier to use and give everyone some new features to interact with.
New Game Modes
Over the next few months we are planning to implement some new game modes in the Battlesnake Engine. To facilitate this, we have setup a submission and review process for members of the community to submit their ideas for what they would like to see. We have seen a bunch of great ideas on the Discord server but we needed a better way to expand the discussion.
If you have an idea, follow the submission guidelines to create a new issue in the BattlesnakeOfficial/rules project and describe how the game mode would work. The Battlesnake Team will review submissions and add the open for voting tag if they think the idea could work on the platform.
Even if you don’t have a new idea, we still need your help. Head over to the BattlesnakeOfficial/rules project to checkout the existing game mode submissions and feel free to provide feedback. If you see a game mode you like, toss a 👍 in the comments to vote for it.
Showdowns!
For those who watched some of the Snake Pit Live! episodes during Spring League they will have witnessed a completely new Battlesnake experience we are calling Showdowns!
Showdowns are a new game-play mode that we can run during a live Twitch stream or during our community meetup events on Discord. Viewers can enter their Battlesnake into a lobby and then the Battlesnake Casting Crew will pit the snakes in a series of ridiculous games live! If you have ever wanted to see 12 Battlesnakes crash and burn in a Royale game on a massive 25x25 board — Showdowns are here to provide that content.
Our first few tests of Showdowns were so successful that we think some special dedicated Showdown episodes of Snake Pit Live will be happening in the future, possibly with some special swag on the line as prizes!
Coming Soon: Challenges v2
We are currently in the process of redesigning the entire challenge system. The initial version of the system was an interesting experiment but we have found it doesn’t quite support the platform in the way we want. The new version of Challenges will no longer have a leaderboard, instead each challenge will be a completable puzzle to solve. Once you succeed at a challenge you are done! This gives us more flexibility to create more engaging (and weirder) challenge puzzles. In addition, we will be assigning achievements and possibly new snake customizations to completing some of the more challenging challenges!
Look for the new challenge system to appear sometime in May.
That’s all for now. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Battlesnake Discord server.
