Snailrace

28th June 2023

Welcome to the thrilling world of snail racing! A Discord bot brings you an exhilarating game where you can race snails in races. But it's not just about winning races - you can buy, sell, and trade snails with different stats, breed them together to create the ultimate snail, and earn achievements and badges that will set you apart from the rest.

Each user has their own profile that displays their wins, virtual snail money, snail count, user level and experience, and recent achievements. But it's the snails themselves that steal the show. Each snail is its own entity with unique stats, personality, and history. Their owners are tracked and their number of wins and win rate are proudly displayed. The ranking system ensures that the best of the best are recognized, and even the snail's mood can be a factor in their performance.

With a range of general, trading, racing, and breeding commands at your disposal, you'll have everything you need to master the world of snail racing. So what are you waiting for? Get ready to feel the rush of the race and the thrill of creating the ultimate snail in snailrace.

Important: This started out as a simple game in the UQCS Discord Bot but people asked if it could be more indepth. It got to the point where it would make more sense to build it into it's own bot so it isn't just limited to the UQCS Discord Server.

How to Run

The first thing you will need to do is create a bot application on discord. This can be done by following the Discord Dev Doc. Once you have made a bot, create or fetch you Bot Token and put it in a .env file.

Note: There is an example .env file called .env.example, you can rename this in your directory to .env and use that.

Once you have setup your app, bot and added it into a discord server, then you are ready to run the program. Eventually there will be binaries avaliable but for now you can just compile it yourself. You will need go installed, if you don't then go to the Go Install docs. Once you have the go then you can run the following in the project directory:

# Build and Compile the program
go build .

# Run the Program
./snailrace

User Profiles

Your user profile in snailrace is your gateway to snail racing glory. Your profile card displays your number of wins, win rate, virtual snail money, snail count, user level and experience, as well as your recent achievements. But that's not all - the profile card also showcases a small number of badges that highlight your accomplishments and set you apart from other players.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newbie to the game, your profile is your way of showing off your snail racing prowess and displaying your achievements for all to see. So get racing, earn those achievements, and collect those badges to build the ultimate snail racing profile in snailrace.

Snails

In snailrace, each snail is stored as an object with its own unique set of stats and personality traits. The snail object tracks the following:

name (randomly generated adjetive + "-" + noun)
level
experience
races raced
wins
original owner
current owner
ranking based on movement stats,
mood (ranging from sad, happy and focused).

One key aspect of each snail is its Step Size Interval, which is calculated based on its max speed, stamina, and recovery which are all within the range of 0 to 20. During each race step, the snail calculates how far it can move using a formula that takes into account its speed, stamina, recovery, and mood, as well as its previous step size and a randomly generated bias value.

Achievements

As alluded to earlier, there will be achievements in this. This isn't to much of a focus currently in early implmentations, but there is a draft document with what is planned here.

Commands

The following are the active commands in the bot. Though if you are interested there is a draft document with what is planned though not set in stone, which can be found here.

Note: All the commands below need to be prefixed with /snailrace

General

ping: Sends the user a Pong @<user>! message. This is only for testing.
init: Initialises your account with a snail and user record. This is required to run any other command.
host: Starts the race cycle, there are the following flags to customise the race:
- no-bets Which removes betting from a race
- only-one The race will replay up to 5 times or until the race doesn't finish in a tie.
- dont-fill If there are less than 4 racers, dont fill with randoms.
join: Joins a specific race using a race_id. This is if you don't want to use the race join buttons.
bet: Place a bet, if you have the funds, on a specific snail in a specific race.