travelers - Braden Everson

The battlefield. Red: your player. Purple: Enemies. Blue: Storm. Brown: Wood. Gray: Rock

Motivation

As I began learning more and more about interpreters and language design, a single idea kept entering my mind. I remembered first learning to code in elementary school, where we would use a language like python to help some robot or duck navigate through a puzzle. Wouldn't it be awesome if you would instead program this animal to *fight*

Battle royale games are pretty popular nowadays, but I am not very good at them. Why not combine something I am pretty good at (random language design) with a battle royale so I can finally be at the top of a leaderboard.

This is the idea that would eventually become travelers, an interpreted language run through WASM to update DOM events happening in a canvas. This canvas would simulate a cellular automata style arena where different programs written by users would control different players, ultimately leading to a glorious battle.

Gameplay Rules

Upon entering the site, players are prompted to enter the training dojo. This area allows them to play around with their program logic script and attempt to create the best battler of them all
When players leave the dojo, they can name their fighter and enter them into the arena
The arena is covered with trees and rocks, and is slowly being consumed by a storm that deals ticking damage to any players in its area.
Wood can be chopped down if a player attacks it, using 5 wood they can place a trap that harms other players
Players can attack other players, shooting them far back into a direction and potentially inside the storm
The last player standing wins

Implementation

Travelers is built around a core interpreter written in Zig that compiles to WebAssembly, creating a sandboxed execution environment where player scripts can run safely while maintaining high performance. The entire system is designed around a deterministic game loop that ensures consistent behavior across all clients.

FightScript Language Design

FightScript is a custom C-style language designed specifically for robot control in the battle royale environment. The language supports:

Language Features:
• Variables and basic arithmetic
• While loops and conditional statements
• Function declarations and calls
• Built-in game actions: move, peek, attack, trap
• Directional parameters: up, down, left, right

Game Tick Sequence:
1. Storm Calculation - Update safe zone boundaries
2. Robot Execution - Run each player's script
3. Action Resolution - Process moves, attacks, traps in priority order
4. Damage Application - Apply storm damage and trap triggers
5. Render Update - Update DOM with new game state

Dojo Training Environment

The 32x32 training dojo provides a sandboxed environment for testing scripts before entering the battlegrounds. It features:

Customizable environment placement (wood, rock, enemy bots)
Syntax highlighting and error detection
Step-through debugging with variable inspection
Performance profiling to optimize script efficiency

A player training their script in the dojo

Leaderboard and Multiplayer

The leaderboard system tracks script performance across multiple battle royale simulations. Each script is evaluated against a diverse set of opponents, with rankings based on survival time, kills, and resource management efficiency. The simulation runs entirely client-side using the same deterministic engine.