DisCard

DisCard is a Discord bot that provides an interactive card game based upon funny moments on your Discord server. I created this with a group of friends in about eight hours for a local hackathon, Beantown Bash. This hackathon was unique in that the judging was entirely done by the participants, meaning that projects had to appeal to a wide audience rather than a small team of judges. This was one of my first programming experiences on a team and it introduced me to proper teamwork in a programming environment.

Features

The bot works by letting users turn messages into cards, assigning them a random score value and a card type (controversial, intellectual, wholesome, random, or humorous) by making use of AI. Users can then battle against each other using their cards, with different card types having advantages and disadvantages over other types. We did not have time to get any further than those core features, but had plans to add trading mechanics, longer games consisting of multiple battles, and a proper scoreboard.

Process

This was one of my first experiences programming with a team and I quite enjoyed not having to handle every single aspect of the project by myself. We did a decent job delegating tasks to each team member, whether it was programming, coming up with the rules, or feeding each scenario to the AI to create art. Even though some of us had just met that day, we worked well together and got through the project with no conflicts. We also created a presentation showcasing our work so that at the end of the day, we could present our project to the other participants.

Conclusion

We ended up doing quite well, winning in one of the hackathon's three prize categories. I was pretty happy with the project, although quite tired and bogged with homework afterwards. Despite the short development time, this project has had a lasting impact on how I write code with a team and present it in front of an audience.