Hey all, I’m Back! And today I’ll be writing a postmortem on an event I participated in a couple of weeks back. At the beginning of November, a colleague from the startup accelerator I’m a part of asked if I wanted to join a local Battlesnake tournament. I had heard of Battlesnake before but never gave it much thought and didn’t fully understand what all went into it.

For those who aren’t familiar, Battlesnake is essentially a competitive game of Snake where developers program their own bots (snakes) to compete for victory. There are countless resources you can use, but a good understanding of algorithms and probability is a must!

To begin, I’m a hobbyist game developer and I do not have professional training in this development realm.

If you’re new to my blog (welcome btw), I am a full-time software developer for a SaaS startup. During the day I mainly program in Dart using the Flutter framework, or sometimes Typescript if I’m venturing into the backend. While it’s undeniable that this hands-on experience in software development has its perks, transitioning these skills to the world of game development is a whole different beast. Gameplay programming and design are unique fields with their own intricate challenges.

purpose

I enjoy playing flight simulators and, during the build process for this adapter (June 2022) I was reeeaaaally into DCS World and MSFS 2020. Both of which, heavily rely on a rudder axis. I have a HOTAS system and the Honeycomb Alpha and Bravo peripherals, which are great. But I don’t, however, have any “professional” rudder pedals.

In my eyes I couldn’t justify spending $200-$300 CAD on a device that closely resembles my pedal system on my Logitech G29. Another issue is that my place is small and I’m already lacking space to store the devices I have now, let alone a separate rudder system.