Bot Of The Month Club

Hangman was my first game bot. I registered for citizenship in AW at the end of March this year and was fortunate enough to be given some space on !Friends by Steller, the world owner there. I’m not much of a builder or avatar maker but have been programming commercially for a few years, so I find bot building a great way to keep coding and have fun at the same time. I wrote my first simple greeter bot in C but decided to try out MrGrimms OCX and VB (Visual Basic) to develop Hangman.

Hangman is a game I used to play as a child and is great for helping kids to spell. Steller built the objects for the game and the bot basically manipulates these using create visible on and create visible off actions. There is a sign that the bot modifies to show the blanks and correct letters in the word you are guessing.

You communicate with the bot with whispers. Whisper Hangman to start the game. Whisper "pick a" to pick the letter a, or use "guess" if you think you know the whole word.

Initially I wrote the bot to respond to normal chat, not whispers, but found that when the world was busy with people chatting (which !Friends often is!) it could become a little confused. I modified it to only respond to whispers and this helped the performance issues.

I found the folks on !Friends very helpful in the testing stages - they were full of encouraging words that helped, especially Steller, MacB, Crazy Canuck, and pookwulf (now immortalised in the game as "pookout" is the command to stop playing). Also built into the game is a small database that keeps a record of how many words each player has got right. Currently Aine is the top scorer with 23 and has been now for a couple of months. I wonder if anyone out there could beat her record?

So come to !Friends and try a game of hangman at 6N 9E altitude 10 Metres. My second bot also runs on !Friends it enables up to 4 players to play poker see if you can find that too.

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