ezscrims
2020-2021 / SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT / UX DESIGN / CHAT BOTIn 2020 I started a personal project called ezscrims aimed at revitalising community-focused Counterstrike by leveraging Discord communities. The value proposition was to write a Discord bot that could be added to users’ communities and host Counterstrike: Global Offensive game servers on demand. This service could be cheaper than renting a dedicated server for these communities, as they would only play a couple of games at any given time, so the servers could be split between several communities across all time-zones using the hosting provider’s API.
Process
I started programming the bot and brought on a friend to help interfacing with the hosting provider’s API, the actual game servers, and building a database to run our community and user management. We managed to release an MVP that signed up users with their steamIDs, started and terminated game servers in user-selected regions, and managed a whitelist for eligible users to join the games.
Future
Planned features before the project was terminated included community- and bot-wide skill ratings, matchmaking between different communities, and non-standard game modes.
Reflection
I learned a lot about developing in Python, JavaScript, and SQL over the course of this project, as well as business planning and digital payment processors. It also gave me the opportunity to think about the UX of chat interfaces, especially Discord’s in combination emoji-based reactions that can be leveraged for user input.