Dev log - #001 - why we built it · 2026-07-31

We built the tactical map we wanted - as engineers first

The order matters more than the idea. Here's what "engineers who happen to play airsoft" actually changes.

Every "tactical map" app we tried was the same story. Gorgeous menus, a satellite layer, a compass rose - and a battery that tapped out somewhere around the second engagement, showing you a teammate's dot frozen where he stood four minutes ago. The map looked tactical. It just wasn't honest, and it didn't last.

So we flipped the sentence. Not "airsofters who learned to code." Engineers who happen to play airsoft. When you build the tool first and play with it second, the unglamorous problems - battery, honest positions, reconnection, how a dot behaves the instant a man stops moving - get solved before the pretty ones. That priority order is the entire product. Everything below is just us being stubborn about it.

Build the tool first. Play with it second. That order is the whole product.

1. The constraint - battery isn't a setting screen. It's the whole game.

   Your phone is kit. Its battery is ammunition - you do not spray it. So the position engine has exactly one GPS feed per phone, movement-gated: hold a position and it stops spending power. When you do move, your position goes out over a broadcast straight to your team - no database round-trip on the hot path - and only writes to the durable store on a slow heartbeat. The cellular radio gets to sleep between real moves instead of screaming every second for a dot that hasn't changed.

   • GPS feeds per device1, movement-gated
   • Live position pathbroadcast, no DB write
   • Durable write~5s heartbeat snapshot
   • Player standing stillnear-zero radio wakeups

   None of that is visible in the app. That's the point - the best engineering is the stuff you never notice because your phone was still at 60% when the game called.

2. The knob - you don't guess the ping. You set it.

   Update speed and battery life pull against each other. That's physics, not something a clever UI hides. So we refused to pick a number for you and put a real one in your hands: 1 to 15 seconds, and it's per player, not per game - your rate pill, nobody else's setting touches it. Crank it to 1s for the final assault, and yes, burn what's left. Coast at 15s for an all-day op where "grey" needs to mean genuinely gone, not lagging.

   1s for the assault. 15s for the endurance op. It's a dial each player owns, not a default we hoped you'd tolerate.

3. The dot - a dot tells you where. An arrow tells you where to.

   Here's the detail we're proudest of, because it's the one everyone else gets lazy about. A moving teammate grows a heading arrowhead pointing at his true course - so you read a push forming at a glance. The instant he holds position, the arrow sheathes and he's a plain dot again. Only the people actually moving carry a direction. No forest of arrows over a stationary squad, and - the trap we specifically refused - no arrow left lying about a stopped man's last heading.

   The dot only ever claims what the data supports. Four states, unmistakable at arm's length:

   • Livefresh
   • Hitself-declared down
   • No signalgreyed, ~22s
   • Lostlast-known intel

   When we lose someone we say so - grey means "we lost them," never "probably still there." A stale dot dressed up as live is how people walk into a room that isn't empty.

4. The honest part - so, straight up.

   It's a dev build. It compiles clean, it's unit-tested, it bundles for iPhone and Android in CI - only the Android build is public during the field test - and it hasn't survived its first real Saturday yet, because the most important test is two phones and a treeline, not a green checkmark. We'll tell you when it has. That's the same honesty we put in the dots: we'd rather say "not proven yet" than show you a frozen position and call it live.

Built by engineers. Who happen to play airsoft. In that order - on purpose.

Found a bug? Tell us on the Phalanx Facebook page - we read everything.