A long blurb about how I programmed an extremely excessive command for my Discord bot.
The Zoo Terminal is a makeshift terminal for my silly Discord bot and idle game, **Zoo.**
It essentially functions like a bot inside of a bot. You type in whatever command you want to run, similar to old prefix-based Discord bots, as well as an actual computer terminal.
Allow Cheats: ON
It’s by far the biggest feature I made for the bot, and definitely the most fun to develop as well. So I figured I’d write about how the whole thing came to be, since it’s one hell of a story to tell.
Zoo is a Discord bot about rescuing animals, trading them with other members, collecting items, and lots of other fun stuff. It was created two years ago (March 2021) as a ‘fun’ command for my oldest Discord bot (and first coding project ever!!), RoboTop.
The terrible jokes were there from day one
After adding Zoo, it was immediately my favorite command to work on. Almost all RoboTop updates were now focused on this single command, and it became pretty clear that it was one of the only features I actually cared about anymore.
Fast forward to more recently, and I’m sick of RoboTop. It’s slow, unoptimized, expensive to maintain, and I just don’t like it. I wanted to shut down the bot, but obviously that would mean losing Zoo as well, which would suck.
So the game plan seemed pretty clear. Port Zoo to a standalone bot.
Moving Zoo to its own bot had a lot of obvious benefits. For example, RoboTop’s r!zoo command was coded in one giant 2000+ line file, because I never expected myself to expand it so much. And by the time it got that long, splitting it into smaller files would have taken way too long.