Dev-blog #1 - New beginnings

So, another Discord bot. For League of Legends..

Admittedly, I'm not the best at writing and putting my words into text, but given I'm writing and developing a new Discord bot, I might as well tell people what's on my mind, my thoughts and ideas.

Why a new bot?

I really enjoy playing League of Legends, I really like coding, I use Discord and I really like tracking my statistics. So does my friends.

But, I don't really like paying for my features, when I can make them myself.

By no means am I throwing shade at any developers putting features behind a paywall, everybody deserved to get paid for their work. I support that.

There are a ton of other bots, which inspired me to just go for it and make my own, but in TypeScript.

Most notably, Zoe bot, made by KaluNight, would come to mind for many people.

I can highly recommend Zoe, I've been using the bot myself for the last 5 months, and if my project fails and fizzles out, I'll probably go back to supporting Kalu and use Zoe.

So... What's on my mind?

Features.. A bunch of them! (Both adding some, and cutting down on bloat from others)

One thing I don't really like with many bots, is that you can't easily hide the fact that you're in-game, if you don't want people to "stalk" you.

Ask me how I know! I personally play with Deceive, and often don't want to deal with saying no to people. Unfortunately, a few of the LoL Discord bots tracks you through the API, and will publicly announce that you're in a game.

With Mel, I want people to be able to temporarily disable that tracking.

Outside of privacy, I also want to test-run mini-games! - Luckily, I already have someone to help me with this, so this will be available in the near future for testing.

I also want to add other fun statistic trackers, that you don't really find on other bots.

The worst offender?
Ease of use.

Mel will be intuitive, easy and quick to setup, and remove again.

With a bunch of features often comes some bloat, that people really don't use, so I plan to also actively try to not introduce functions that people won't be using.

This will ultimately mean, that some features might be introduced, but quickly be removed again, depending on how many people use them.

So to very quickly recap:
- Will be written solely in TypeScript.
- Features will be free.
- Privacy.
- Mini-games.
- Statistics that people will use.
- Cut down on bloat.
- Make Mel easy to use.

I'm committed to always provide the best product I possibly can. This can come at the cost of new features taking a bit to be introduced, as I want to make sure everything works 99.9% of the time.

Right now Mel is closed source, but further down the line, I've been toying with the idea of making her open source, to allow people to contribute, but also take Mel to new heights, with their own ideas and features.

Where can you find Mel?
- Discord
- GitHub

Mel will not be on Twitter/X or Bluesky, so watch out for people trying to pose as the Mel developer-team.

With all that said, thank you for reading this blog-post! - If you have any questions or want further conversation, just the Discord-server and hit me up!

- Hawk