Text Your Battlesnake's Progress

Intro

I've been running a Battlesnake server for a few months now, and while I know it's participating in Arenas/Leagues approximately every ten minutes, I wanted a little more insight into how my snake is doing. This project allows me to see my snake's progress in the league at regular intervals. I used Twilio because it's super easy to get messages sent to my phone.

The final repo: Github

Setup

Fork the JavaScript Starter Snake

Clone your repository

git clone git@github.com:{YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME}/starter-snake-javascript.git
cd starter-snake-javascript

Add the packages we'll be using: node-persist to save game results, dotenv to interact with environment variables, and Twilio to send messages

npm install twilio node-persist dotenv

Set up your environment variables how you would like. For me, I use the dotenv package and create a .env file at the root of the repository:

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
FROM_NUMBER=+10005550199
TO_NUMBER=+10005550198

You will need to update each of these with your own Credentials from Twilio's Console, including a From Number that you have authorized to send SMS. The To Number will be where you want to receive the updates.

Update Battlesnake's Logic

There's two spots we will update to get these reports going. First, at the top of the logic.js file, we need to initialize dotenv, node-persist and twilio, as well as define some variables for use later:

// Dotenv
require('dotenv').config()

// node-persist
const storage = require('node-persist');
storage.init()

// Twilio
const twilio = require('twilio')();

// Settings
const UPDATE_FREQUENCY = 10 // Every 10 games, send an upate

Next we can update the /end endpoint function to do our logic.

async function end(gameState) {
    console.log(`${gameState.game.id} END\n`)
    // Parse the results
    let winnerName = false
    let won = false
    if (gameState.board.snakes.length !== 0) {
        const winningSnake = gameState.board.snakes[0]
        winnerName = gameState.board.snakes[0].name
        if (winningSnake.id === gameState.you.id) {
            won = true
        }
    }
    // Save the results to storage
    let games = []
    try {
        games = await storage.getItem('games')
    } catch (err) {
        console.error('failed to load games')
    }
    games.push({
        winnerName,
        won
    })
    await storage.setItem('games', games)
    // If we have enough results
    if (games.length % UPDATE_FREQUENCY === 0) {
        await sendSummary(games) // Defined next
    }
}

Note the async at the beginning of the function definition. We are using asynchronous functions so we gotta set that there.

We first determine if we are the winner. We are not told whether we won, so we have to determine if we won by being the only snake left alive at the end of the game.

Next, we pull our games from storage, and add our own to the array. Then we check if it's time to send an update, and call a function if so. Here's the function I made for myself:

async function sendSummary(games) {
    // Prepare a summary
    const gamesWon = games.filter(g => g.won)
    const gamesLost = games.filter(g => !g.won)
    const winPercent = Math.floor(gamesWon.length / games.length * 100)
    const from = process.env.FROM_NUMBER
    const to = process.env.TO_NUMBER

    // First, show the win rate
    let body = `After ${games.length} games, you have ${gamesWon.length} wins for rate of ${winPercent}%`

    // Next, find the people who defeated me the most
    const winnersNames = gamesLost.map((game) => game.winnerName)
    const rankedWinners = winnersNames.sort((a, b) => {
        winnersNames.filter(w => w === a).length - winnersNames.filter(w => w === b).length
    })
    const highestWinner = rankedWinners[0]
    const highestWinnerCount = rankedWinners.filter(w => w === highestWinner).length
    body += `\nYou lost the most to ${highestWinner} (${highestWinnerCount} times)`

    twilio.messages.create({
        from,
        to,
        body
    })
}

This will let me know my games won, games played, win percentage, and the snake who beats me most often.

Final Thoughts

There's a lot of ways you can run with this tech. You could implement subscriptions to let others get the updates. You could trigger a cron job to send a report and get a daily update instead of after a certain number of games. You could send detailed information about every game as it happens. You could set up Phone call alerts when you have a surprisingly low win rate.