Light game is now a Discord bot!

Lots of interesting things happened in the recent months. So it's time that I update here!

Lightbot the discord bot

First of all, I made a port of light game as a Discord bot! If you go to this discord server https://discord.gg/ysDXzdu you can play with Lightbot. Lightbot is similar to light game: it generate new images every 5 minutes and it evolves slowly over time. The difference is that you have to request for your pictures by typing the !light command in the chat. Because you'll likely interact a lot less frequently with Lightbot than light game, I made it so that it's a lot easier to level up.

Fun fact, the bot runs on a tiny server, which is actually a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a tiny and cheap (~30-50$) computer you can buy and hack cool stuff with. The bot itself is programmed in javascript and runs with a Node.js server. A faithful PM2 deamon watches over it and relaunch it when it crashes. 

Working with javascript, node and programming server code was certainly a challenge for me. Then making it run on the Pi, which runs Linux, was also quite challenging. Nothing is ever easy to install on Linux, that's for sure! :P I'm glad to have it running now though. It was a fun project.

If you have your own Discord server, you can invite Lightbot to your server with this link: https://discordapp.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=411618329673990157&permissions=52224&scope=bot (Note: You need to be one of the server's admins to invite it. Otherwise, give that link to your admins!)

The future

So what's next for Lightbot and my game devs days in general? Well, first I'd like to improve the code of Lightbot and make it more modular, that is, to split the game and image part and the server logic part. Once that's done, I'd like to look into porting it to other platforms (ex: Twitter, Mastodon, Slack, etc.) I'd like to help others host their own instance of the bot too. And then, of course, I'd like to make cool new bots! I have interesting ideas for that! 

See ya!