MacaronMonkey

Inspiration

As Melbournians are forced into our 5th lockdown since the beginning of COVID, more and more people are turning to virtual hangouts in order to spend time with friends and family. Discord is one of the most popular platform for this purpose. There is often more than one irritable individual in any Discord server that speaks over everyone, cracks horrible jokes and is mean for no reason! The MacaronMonkey is a Discord bot that aims to solve this problem by giving them a taste of their own medicine.

What it does

The MacaronMonkey's primary purpose is to entertain everyone on the server at the expense of its target. It will follow the victim to any voice channel they join, and make screeching monkey noises whenever they try to speak. The Monkey will also reply and react to any comments made by the targetted user, while refusing to follow any of their commands! The only way for this nightmare to end for the victim is for an admin to issue a !mercy command to the bot. In addition, the MacaronMonkey also provides a random meme on demand from Reddit to help cure your lockdown boredom.

How we built it

So how did we build this beautiful piece of art, you ask? We chose Javascript as the primary underlying language for creating our bot. This is because Discord has a very powerful and well-documented Javascript library. Our team decided that our bot does not require a front-end as part of the MVP, so most of our development effort was focused on the back-end using the NodeJS runtime environment. Github was chosen as our primary version control system, which integrates very well with Heroku, the cloud platform we've used to deploy and host the bot in order to allow it to be a menace to society 24/7.