One big request I got the last time I showed the game was the ability to write your own AI for it. I thought about it and realized that would be totally do-able! The downside is that you have to host the AI service yourself, so it's sort of BYOAI, but it won't need to support a massive ton of requests or anything like that yet so free webservice hosting like Heroku will be more than sufficient.

One of our wonderfully brilliant community members, asah, is currently working on his own AI for the game in python. He hopes to implement machine learning and beat the meta :). He has graciously shared his github project with us. You can check out what he's got so far at https://github.com/asah/meatshields-python-botkit

I've also included a text-dump of my basic example bot core AI file in PHP, just to give you an idea of how that works. Warning, it's a little ugly because I just whipped it together as an example community-created bot. It doesn't include the full service architecture like handling the necessary incoming requests. https://pastebin.com/eEY1YYQR

If you want to check out the docs for creating an AI, take a look at https://meatshields.com/createBotGuide.php

And of course, please do come check out the game itself at https://meatshields.com

I hope to see you in a game!