What does the project do?
A discord bot is something that users can add to their discord server that responds to chat messages to provide useful functionality. For example, a user could type .ban @mrpenguin and the bot would ban this user. Of course, this is possible with the built-in user interface, but there's so much more that a bot can do beyond what is available already.
Some of the things that Spectral does:
- Play flappy bird, akinator, or would you rather.
- Grab some friends and play UNO! or connect 4, or make a story one word at a time.
- Gamble with virtual currency on blackjack, slot machines, horse races or robbing a bank!
- Find images of dogs, cocktails, the astronomy picture of the day or generate a meme
- Play hangman, choose from 19 trivia categories, or guess some anagrams
- A bunch of other really random stuff using lots of random APIs, and some more minigames.
How is it made?
Spectral is made in Python. Spectral also makes use of a number of libraries and APIs to support many of the fun features. If you're interested in an example of a technical challenge in the implementation, check out my blog post on how I avoid multiple bots talking over each other when sharing the same prefix.
What have I learnt?
Some things I've learnt:
- Writing code that works.
- Writing code that's maintainable (the best way to learn this is to write rubbish code, return to it 2 years later, and then vow to never do that again...).
- Things take longer as a project scales up.
- Listening to customer feedback, and knowing when to ignore it.
- The importance of marketing.
Find out more in the full blog post