Discord Duels
Discord Duels is a game project that I started in my senior year of highschool as a Discord bot where people could play rock-paper-scissors based game against a computer controlled opponent. After initially creating it, word of the game’s existence was passed on via word of mouth online which unintentionally created a small community of players. From these players I began to receive feedback and it fueled my motivation to continue working on the project by adding more features and systems that players would enjoy. The game was eventually able to attract thousands of players as it grew from a simple rock-paper-scissors clone into a fully fledged role playing game with numerous ways for players to customize their character, story content and multiplayer interactions such as Player versus Player (PVP) duels or parties.
While some of my pride in creating this game stems from the magnitude of depth I was able to implement into the game and fanbase I was able to grow, I am also proud of the many lessons I learned throughout the games development. Being that this was my first game to really attract an audience, I was able to gain the experience of managing player feedback and communicating my vision for the game to my players. Additionally, since I wanted the game to grow in order to keep players interested over time, I had to take on the challenges of balancing and preventing game systems from becoming obsolete or overlooked. Admittedly, I made mistakes along the way, but I’m grateful to have had this experience early on in my time as a developer so that I am able to learn from it and prevent the problems I encountered when working on future games.