Discord Text Adventure Game

Inspiration

The inspiration for the text adventure bot stemmed primarily from being exposed to the idea of programming discord bots during pre-hacks. While trying to think of a fun use for a bot, I noticed discord's chat rooms were kind of like contained locations, which when combined with nostalgia for old video games sparked the idea that a discord server could be turned into a text adventure game.

What it does

The discord text chat bot is designed to host a very simplistic text adventure game. The bot randomly draws prompts to set the scene of the text world, then by making use of discord commands, users can type chat commands to interact with the game world.

How I built it

A lot of the development process for me was simply learning how to use python and the discord API to create what I had in mind. Working solo, every aspect was up to me and my limited prior knowledge to piece together a working prototype.

Challenges I ran into

By far the greatest set back for me was the few hours spent trying to debug a command involving assigning users roles. While I definitely should've given up quicker, the constant feeling of almost having it fixed drove me to continue. However, this setback did give me the insight to scale back and focus on just making the basic functionality work, which in the end allowed for even a basic proof of concept to exist.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I'm most proud of with this bot is that it uses JSON files for storing its prompts. While certainly using JSON is nothing special, for me this was a sort of "ah ha!" moment when I realized this higher level than what I'm used to idea clicked and I independent of any instruction thought up a use case for it.

What I learned

As a first-year CS major with very little proper programming experience, this bot is one of the few larger scale projects I've ever worked on. The main takeaway from me for this is simply getting comfortable with Python, a language being used all around me, but one I previously haven't had a strong opportunity to work with. Additionally, this was also my first chance to work with JSON, which I've never had a chance to implement into a project before, but it certainly came in handy here for storing information about the various scenes a channel could run.

What's next for Discord Text Adventure Game

There's a lot of ways I would love to expand this project. Between features left on the cutting room floor, mechanics that could be more complex, and just generally expanding the size of the adventure, there's a lot of room for expansion that I just didn't have time to fit in as a novice, solo programmer. This was quite enjoyable to work on and I'd love to see it, or a similar idea, fully fleshed out.

Built With

• discord
• python