Nullo - BOT

devlog 1

well. the aliens are getting a slack bot.

i’ve started working on a bot to bring my procedural alien generation algorithm into Slack. the idea is to let people generate aliens directly in their channels, see what they’ve created and make them fight each other.

it’s inspired by Myuu, the pokemon discord bot. except instead of pokemon, we have whatever the hell my generator decides to produce.

HOW IT WORKS

rather than recreating the generator inside the bot, i’m using the website that’s already running.

Nullo uses Node.js, Slack Bolt and Playwright. it opens the deployed website in a headless Chromium browser, calls its existing JavaScript API and captures the rendered alien from the canvas.

the bot then sends the image and the corresponding information back into Slack.

so the website does the actual generation, rendering and combat. Nullo is essentially the interface between that and Slack. no duplicated generator, no separate deployment of the website’s API.

THE SETUP

following the guide was ridiculously easy.

like. suspiciously easy.

got the project set up, installed the dependencies, connected Playwright to the website and got the files running with npm start.

the guide did spoon-feed us a little too much with all the copy-pastable code. could’ve let us figure out a few things ourselves. 😭

anyway, the actual setup went smoothly.

AND THEN SLACK

well.

i got the bot installed in my workspace and tried running the commands. first attempt wasn’t exactly successful.

the /nullo-ping command wasn’t registered in the original handler, and the error handling wasn’t particularly useful either. instead of telling me what actually went wrong, it just returned a generic error.

so i’ve been fixing the command handlers and improving the diagnostics.

WHAT’S WORKING TOWARDS

still working on getting the complete thing running properly.

the next step is moving it to Hack Club Nest so the bot can stay online without having my laptop running all the time.

more aliens. now in Slack.

👽

hehehe, you arent getting my apis