Two years ago my friend Chad and I released Botswana, a browser-based arena game with programmable bots written in JavaScript.

But the original was kind of boring. So we tweaked the game mechanics a bit and made a number of other modifications (multiple bots per team, extensible rulesets, etc.). And now we present Botswana 2.0, a culmination of rampant nerdiness.

The thing that interests me most about the game now is the customizable rulesets. For example, it took all of ten minutes to change the game so it’s played on a series of conveyor belts that move the bots up and down:

It likewise took less than half an hour to make the bots orbit the Death Star instead:

Since the drawing code is part of the ruleset, it’s fairly easy to get a radically different look:

Switching between the rulesets is just a matter of changing the URL in the ruleset box and starting a new tournament.

Anyway, as before, the release is on GitHub, with a README that explains how to write bots and customize rulesets and stuff.

As previewed a little while ago, I’d like to introduce Botswana:

A couple weeks ago at work I was talking with two of my coworkers and Core War came up somehow. I got excited about the idea of writing AI bots to compete with each other. Conferring with my friend Chad, we decided to make it web-based and use Javascript as the scripting language for both the bots and the game engine. A couple days later, we had a working engine, and we’ve been fine-tuning it since then.

Each turn, the engine sends the current state of the world to each bot. The bot can then give the engine its command — to move forward, move backward, turn left, turn right, or fire. Last bot standing wins. We’ve gone with an intentionally simple rule system for now, but we’ve got some fun plans for future improvements.

The code’s open source and is on Github.

Here’s a quick sneak preview of my current project: