The story of a bot

Hello! Last 4 months I busy developing a nonprofit bot Telegram. Now it daily plays from one to four hundred people and for me it is a great success. If you are interested in the history of the development, then ask under the cut.

Start

a Little about the circumstances that pushed me into it. Being played in @godnotbot (by the way, I recommend) wanted to create a text RPG with dungeons and dragons.

having Determined that it will be a text RPG in the Telegram, I wondered what will be in this RPG. And the inside was similar to gonobolin the decision — occasional room or situation. Press the button, get a new room. On top of that was the gods that gave different bonuses for prayer and was angry when they went to another faith. And also, a store that sold all kinds of stuff to facilitate your path to inevitable death.

With the concept figured out, now you need to do. For development I chose Python. Why? Why there is no bots on it it is written already much, and the language of experience.

Drawstring

as a result, the light appeared a simple bot with a little more than a dozen rooms. The bot now you can always find here. The child was shown to all friends and the story is almost ended. The game was rescued from oblivion by a sudden thought: but it would be nice to show someone else.

other took a ride VPS, configured the settings and run the bot in an infinite loop. Then whip up a pile group in the VC and wrote a post on Peekaboo. Without knowing it, as I explained later, I chose the time for your post so glad I caught their whole audience and the first day to get acquainted with the bot came 3,000. It was cool. But then problems arose.

Things first

Telegram will not allow you to send a lot of messages. But “a lot” is different for everyone. There are limits on posts per minute in private chat, the group, the total number of messages per day, per second in all chats. How it works exactly and the exact number is unknown. Yes, the website there is about three paragraphs, but the reality is that there are limits, you can break it, but no one knows what will happen. So I put a restriction on sending 30 messages per second and all the errors went away. But during peak hours users sometimes had to wait for their messages for longer than ten seconds.

Wrote in a support that can't stand it. A few days later they said need to write in support for bots. Support for bots, a few days after the verdict: live with it, can't help it. Recommend you still use the inline buttons, but this option does not suit me — then it will lose the message history. In the end had to stay for thirty messages per second and stop.

the second Situation

the Project was completely open (and remains so until now! source code), and it played an important role in the development of the project — people started to help: send your ideas, edit the code, draw for the bot. And most importantly, there were several volunteers on a regular basis help with the bot so far. This Andrew, Vladislav and Alex (just wanted to note Eric. so, he always helped me with the bot, though a bit not where did all the other (: ). And a little later for the whole game was drawn by your stakeback (Thanks to Alex for this).

This paragraph, I want to note that if you are greedy and not afraid of code theft, you can ask for help from your community and most likely will help you. But if you think your code need someone — don't worry, you will gain a bigger audience than the people who stole the code (although maybe not lucky and things go sideways, but this means that either somewhere you made a wrong turn, or a thief invests in clone a lot of money. But the idea you still can always steal).

Ideas are a lot of users there are, the process is, what's next? Then we think about the translation of your product on the self. Without hesitation, I organized donations on Yandex.Money, in fact, these money bot is still alive, and it warms the soul.

In November, contacted support, Recalling the restrictions on the number of messages and offered to take them off partially, as an exception to the popular bot. Now we can instantly reply to bypass the restrictions (if Telegram wants, she can always return them to us). We have removed the queue in the code but later found that the restrictions did not disappear. Support replied that instantly you can only respond to short messages, less than 500 characters. Sad, but the rules dictate we are not.

And right now we together with the community to translate the bot into English. There are over 1,800 phrases, some of which are long, and some can not just translate. For example: "FOR VDV!". Now the game is fully translated and is the editor for the correction.

Interchange

What I wanted? Text RPG in the telegram. What do I get? Bot, in which every week a thousand people who kill time in traffic jams, and the 4 months of development with fun people and interesting acquaintances. And while preparing to transfer, release of the bot in the web and the introduction of large-scale multiplayer system (:

What will happen? Who knows...

If you will be interested in this topic, the next post will describe the problems in the development and of the mechanisms of the game (you can ask questions for the next post if there are). The bot can be found here here.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru