The main idea behind the bot is to turn the usual idle/grind gameplay loop slightly on its head. In usual games, your power is constant and prices increase exponentially. In VFox, prices increase linearly, and your power decreases exponentially. This achieves the same growth idea, but in a novel way.

I actually had the idea for a game like this when I was in middle school, back when Cookie Clicker was super popular. The idea stewed in the back of my head for a while, until I finally made it a reality many years later.

The catalyst for this decision was that I wanted to learn how databases work, and making a game that stores complex player data is a great way to figure things out.

I used Discord.js to make the bot. It was what was almost universally recommended to me by other people who have also made discord bots. There were times I wished that the documentation was more descriptive, though.

To store user data, I use MongoDB, using Mongoose. Ideally, I would self-host the database, but MongoDB Atlas has a free tier with enough storage for a few hundred users, which I felt was sufficient for now. I doubt the bot will ever actually get popular, so there was no need to make my life more difficult by self-hosting the database and needing to worry about backups/uptime/etc.

I do self-host the actual bot itself, though. I don't currently have a second computer or server, so it is currently just running in the background of my main PC. This is a nonoptimal solution, but it's the best I could come up with given my hardware limitations.

Currently, the bot is online for anyone to engage with. You can check it out in the official server, or add it to your own discord servers with the bot invite link.

All in all, this is probably the biggest, most complex project I've ever made. Because not only are there many many components to the game itself, but there's also the entire ordeal of balancing everything. (For the balancing, the beta testers have been very very helpful. Thank you!). I am glad at how it turned out, and I hope that people enjoy playing VFox.

The VFox image is taken from a reddit post. I couldn't get into contact with the original artist, so if you are the artist and do not wish for me to use your image, please contact me!!