Just as COVID started, my friends and I were planning a trip to Victoria, BC to participate in one of Battlesnake's live tournaments. Travel restrictions put a stop to things, but ever since then, Battlesnake has had an amazing online/virtual presence and we've been able to participate in multiple events through Twitch. I'm using it as practice to learn programming languages that I don't normally play with at my day job. Also learning a ton of game theory and data structures/algorithms along the way!
I was really concerned with what would happen to BattleSnake during the pandemic. The live events were way too much fun and I wasn't sure how that would transfer fully online.
Turns out I didn't need to worry. The online shows have been top-notch! The quality of the games are better (snakes tend to be better prepared) and the casting team is hilarious. Even my non-techie partner loves watching them.
Can't wait to see what the team does with funding.
Every year the CS department at my old uni have a get together dinner for old and current students and teachers.
The main event is a programming competition called snakeu (or something similar can never get the spelling correct), which is exactly this but in Java and no web servers.
A few times the winner have been the team that took the basic snake which always turns right and improved it by always turning left (generally you get 15 or 30 mins to code it).
You build the API which implements a move handler, and every turn of the game the Battlesnake engine calls your move API with the full board state information and your API returns a move (up down left or right).
