I COULDN'T THINK OF A GAME IDEA. A BOT CAN DO IT I GUESS...

Sometimes as a programmer, you are so lazy that you just make bots to do stuff for you.

3:45 AM (AEST), August 23rd, 2021

All I've wanted from these new lockdowns in Australia is to develop a new project or two, but ideas aren't flowing as well as they usually do when I can be out and about in the world being inspired by things. I decided the best solution for this was using a Game Jam to get inspired, which resulted in me thinking: "How do they come up with themes? Generated right? Is there a Discord Bot, so I can always have it ready?". Nope, it didn't look like there were any Discord Bots. "I suppose I could make one and think of a game idea along the way!". (Spoilers: No game idea, but I did make a bot!)

So I do have some experience making Discord Bots. Last year I spent a night creating and learning how to create my first bot ImpostorBot, a bot created to take advantage of the Among Us trend and make it easier to invite players. I spent a week or so polishing up ImpostorBot, playing with different Discord features, and that was that. I haven't had another idea until now, which I was surprised to find that development was easy compared to the last. See, all this idea took was learning how to do JSON parsing, which is the same as I expected, and then getting a list of themes, genres and limitations to use for the random generation.

Genres and Limitations for the bot were easy to write; I wrote the Limitations myself and genres based on research of classic and modern-day genres used in the industry. However, the Themes list required a little more work. Initially, the development of the Themes list was manual and written by myself; this was slow and impractical. After some research of theme lists and other idea generators for game developers, I stumbled upon a project on itch.io by Gunnar Clovis; He had also made a theme generator, but instead of a Discord bot, he hosted it online. After a few email exchanges, he graciously allowed me to use his theme list, giving my bot millions of combinations along with the genres and limitations I had already written.

Please check out some of Gunnar's work: @GunnarClovis.

After the database of ideas to generate was complete, there was nothing left to do but polish, name it and get it running on my Heroku server. Naming was pretty easy; I went with JamJar because its ideal usage is for game jams, so I thought the "Jam" of game jams is the ideas/themes part, and this bot is the "Jar" that holds it? I thought it was clever anyway.

Now to get it running on my Heroku server did involve some sad news. To have two bots cost money to run each month, meaning ImpostorBot is no more. There is still a bright side to ImpostorBot's demise. Hopefully, I can list this bot on directories for Discord bots AND actually get some servers installing this one!

It was a short but very fun and well worth project making JamJar! Hopefully, I can get it out into a few servers, as I honestly believe it's a fun little tool and very handy for other developers like me!