I have always championed for tools that make development easy. I think working professionally really showed me how important tools are. I saw what a difference they can make and how must faster things can be. Obviously setting them up can take some time but they end up saving time for the whole team.

We have several tools that we use to make our lives easier, I don’t think the development of the games would be possible without them. But with the shift to the new remote working style, these tools felt a little outdated. The interaction with these tools didn’t seem natural and took you out of the “flow“ state. I think this ends up being very costly.

So in the free time I got, I worked on a Discord Bot, which is a simple client that looks out for certain commands and then just makes calls to particular functions. I ended up integrating a lot of our tools with the bot. So now developers don’t have to leave what they are doing, open another application, do the task and switch back. Since everyone has Discord open at all times, we just send the message on the Discord server and voila! The bot takes care of the rest, it will perform the function that you need. I ended up giving the bot new capabilities like checking if a release has gone live. Nightly builds for continuous integration.

The tools we had were excellent, but just adding a few more tools and making the interaction with the tools a little better ended up yielding a lot of benefits. We are trying to streamline a lot of our processes and trying to automate a lot of things, so developers can spend time on challenges that cannot be solved by 2 lines of code.

What was easy became even easier!