Me

PikaDude

A Software Developer who makes things sometimes

Animal Crossing Music Extension Logo

Animal Crossing Music Extension

January 2020 - Present(?) (Contributor)

A Chrome extension that plays background music from the Animal Crossing franchise in real-time throughout your day.

It features hourly music from every mainline game in the series, synchronization with your current weather (where it will play rainy or snowy variations of songs), K.K. Slider, and a customizable Town Tune that plays on the hour!

The project was initially started in 2012, with the initial 1.0 and 2.0 versions of the extension being developed by Andrex and blazescorch2 from NeoGaf. The project essentially stayed in limbo for a few years until I became the top contributor on GitHub and started releasing new features and versions again with the help of a few other people too.

Unfortunately, soon after reaching over 100,000 users, Google took the extension down, and never fully told us why. The extension remains still downloadable via GitHub, but with Google taking down the main source of installs, development came to an end once again and the project currently remains unmaintained.

brugh

brugh

January 2020 - Present

A dumb Twitter Bot that posts memes on an interval due to popular request. Also somehow has 40 followers.

I have a folder of memes that are kind of well-known between friends and others.

I've gotten a lot of requests to share the full folder with people, but I thought it would ruin a lot of the fun of me sharing them at random and people getting unique reactions each time. If it was always available at everyone's disposal, everyone would have seen them before I would even share anything from it.

So, I decided to come to a compromise and make a Twitter bot that just shares them on an interval.

As for the name, if I recall correctly, I once misspelt "bruh", and for the profile picture, I've never played Xenoblade Chronicles before, I just think funny British man Shulk is funny, with all of his silly taunts in Smash Bros. and I thought that this FaceApp edit was also funny.

In case it wasn't already obvious, this whole thing is one big meme. But it does use a few features of Twitter's API and did take some effort to make lol.

Discord Bots

Discord Bots

October 2018 - Present (Contributor)

The original Discord bot list, listing bots since 2015. Find the perfect bot for your Discord server today.

Due to various circumstances, in late October of 2018, the Discord Bots server was suddenly left without a bot listing website, which is kind of important for a bot list.

I was brought on to help quickly make a new one. I worked on various API endpoints on the backend, and a tiny thing here and there on the frontend, like the scrolling banner image you see on a lot of the pages.

I doubt much of the code I originally wrote remains today, and I haven't contributed to it too much since, but I still help out in the Discord Bots server/community in various ways, mainly with moderation and also making server-specific bots, etc.

Erisly

Erisly

March 2016 - Present

Erisly is a cute Goddess who uses her powers to play with people by pretending to be a fun multipurpose Discord Bot. With over 270,000 Discord servers under her belt, this makes her roughly the 95th largest bot on all of Discord.

One day in March of 2016, I got bored and made a Discord Bot for a small group of friends. They liked it, so I kept working on it and adding new features. Then, people started asking to invite it to their servers, so I decided to list it publicly. 8 years later, that bot slowly evolved into what you see today.

The bot was originally known as PikaBot01, and it didn't have a specific purpose or scope. It was made before Bot accounts and an official API on Discord were a thing, so it used to run on a regular user account (before that was really against TOS). I was given the choice to migrate the user account to a bot account but chose not to, hence why Erisly's current Discord account has a different creation date from her real creation date.

The bot was renamed from PikaBot01 to PikaGirl on a whim in August of 2016 - back then it was just a tiny hobby and I didn't exactly have any standards for the bot - these sorts of random things were common back then lol. The bot slowly grew in popularity over the years, and I slowly began to take it a little more seriously ("huh... people actually like what I'm doing here?"), with things being more organised, my server becoming exclusively for PikaGirl, original artwork for the bot, less shitposting, localisations/translations, etc.

Eventually, I came to the difficult decision to rebrand PikaGirl to Erisly. The rebrand to PikaGirl was done without any real thought - back then I never expected my stupid little bot to get to where it is today - and I didn't really like the name for various reasons. I think the final straw was someone thinking I had made it my robo girlfriend or something (PikaDudexPikaGirl) which I somehow never picked up on for about 3 years or so. Really, it honestly never occurred to me it looked like that. I still always sort of pictured it as PikaBot and the penny never dropped, I guess.

A completely original character was made, with an original name, art, etc. Things were done backwards with her "backstory" and I had to make one based off of her design (instead of the other way around, which is usually how it's done if they're not editing the design which I wasn't in the position to do so) and I had to make it work with the concept of her being a Discord Bot. I came up with the idea of her being a Goddess, and the handful of people I was asking thought it would be a good idea.

Erisly has honestly helped a lot of people in various ways, and she's enjoyed by many. That was the reason why I even decided to continue working on the bot back in 2016 - I could've very easily dropped it and moved on - but I loved seeing first-hand how something I made would make others laugh and spread joy, and nothing has changed. I hope people will continue to enjoy Erisly as much as I do, and I can keep the privilege to continue working on her for years to come.

pictochat.online

pictochat.online

Still in Development

pictochat.online is a faithful online recreation of PictoChat, allowing you to send and receive messages and drawings easily, to and from up to 15 other users over the Internet. It's still in development (very slowly), but the Discord Server is the best place to follow development.

I'm nowhere near the first person to ever think "yo what if they made pictochat but on the internet i think that would be pretty cool and neat", but I think I'm officially the first person to ever do something as ambitious as this.

PictoChat, running entirely within your web browser and over the Internet, was something I would begin working on in January of 2019, which I would shortly put off onto the backburner, after realising that a lot more planning would be needed and that I also didn't have the necessary skills or knowledge to build such a thing at the time. I had started development in raw HTML/JS using a game framework called Phaser, but I was struggling a lot with it for various reasons. At the time, it wasn't going to be a 1:1 recreation of PictoChat, but instead be a "modernised" version, featuring a responsive design and would try to work without simulating dual-screens. The problem was, I hadn't put much thought into how I was going to do such a thing, since a lot of the sprites aren't exactly designed to be responsive. Not to mention, I eventually realised that while PictoChat is often referred to as a "game", it shares more similarities with being a regular application than a game. What I mean is it's closer to something made that is made with a UI framework rather than a game framework, which lead to a lot of struggles using a game framework like Phaser, as it didn't exactly have in-built support/components for a lot of otherwise common UI elements and functions (like making things responsive, this was by far my biggest issue with Phaser), and instead had more things a game would need, like a physics engine, cameras, 3D models, and complex animations. While it would be possible to remake PictoChat using a Game framework, it would be like trying to draw artwork in Microsoft Word - it's not exactly the best tool for it.

The project would remain on hiatus for a long time, but I hadn't forgotten about it. I kept thinking about it, planning and learning new skills as time went on. At some point, I came up with the name PictoChat.Online, and registered the domain for it too in July of 2019.

In late October of 2020 - nearly 2 years after I first started development (and abandoned it lol) - I started completely fresh. I had the idea to use Vue.js along with Nuxt.js. Vue.js is a frontend framework that builds on HTML and is specifically designed for building user interfaces (also known as UI, see where I'm going with this?). I thought "HTML/Vue.js is designed specifically to make user interfaces AND it powers every website AND it already has just about everything I would need, why the hell would I bother trying to make something that's already been available to me since the start?" So that's the path I took, and I've been working on it ever since (with various gaps and breaks).

Currently, pictochat.online is still in development, but it's closer to finishing than it's ever been. Only recently did I start to think that it would ever be finished, up until then I always thought I'd hit another roadblock and stop development (like I did in 2019), and that's the main reason why I've been pretty quiet about it up until now. You can see development updates in the Discord server (linked below), I often post updates and pictures there. Hopefully it will be finished soon, I've been trying really hard to make it perfect, so that's why it's taken quite a while (excluding the fact that it's a hobby project and time is a limited resource haha).

Also, on another note, I couldn't find any evidence of what would happen if you tried to join a full room in PictoChat, so I assembled a bunch of friends and 17 DS's to finally uncover the truth to which I found after that I might have been the first person to ever post about this message on the Internet (trust me, I tried looking even after knowing what the error message was, I genuinely couldn't find a single result), so that's pretty neat.

Twitter NES

Twitter NES

January 2021 - September 2021

A Twitter Bot where people can vote for inputs to a NES and try to beat certain games. With over 1,000 people following the bot and fumbling their way around, I'm certain that this is a reasonable goal for the next 2-3 years.

Inspired by Twitch Plays/Twitch Plays Pokemon and all of those goddamn Twitter Snake Bots, I decided to implement a similar concept to Twitter that wasn't as basic and linear as Snake.

There isn't a lot to this, just a NES emulator, a Lua script for the emulator, a Node.js script, and a Twitter Bot, all held together by duct tape. I am scared to touch the bot in case I break it since frames are posted every 10 minutes, that doesn't exactly give me a lot of time to fix things without any noticeable impact if it goes down.

Also, it's kinda surreal to slowly see people I follow on Twitter also start to follow the bot.

The bot went offline on the 21st of September 2021 due to some kind of service network outage. When services returned, I was unable to boot the bot. In my attempts to revive it, things only got worse due to that duct tape I mentioned earlier. The only way for it to come back was to rewrite the entire project and figure out a better way to integrate it into a NES Emulator while also trying to recover or recreate the progress that was made. Unfortunately, after hours of experimenting, I was unable to find a better emulator that would work well for this sort of project, but I was still keeping my head high and conceptualized a better system for the bot.

However, I had various issues arise in my personal life, and thanks to Discord's rampant changes for bots, the countless bots I had running (mainly Erisly) were suddenly at risk. I had put the project on hold for a while with intentions of coming back, however, with the recent Takeover of Twitter and hostile changes towards bots, this project is no longer possible. I'm sorry.

But... with the recent rise in the Fediverse and possibly other competing social media platforms, this project may see a revival elsewhere in the future.

We Are Jammin'

We are Jammin'

February 2022

We are Jammin' is a joke website based on the popular joke video where it has a clip of the Captain Underpants movie with Jetpack Joyride music with a "funny twist". For some reason people genuinely send this to their friends and it gets thousands of users a month...

I had wanted to make this site for quite a while since I kept seeing it a lot on Twitter, and apparently it originated on TikTok and was used a bunch there. I was pretty bored one night so I pumped it out in a few hours, finishing it at around 3 or 4 in the morning. The domain was haphazardly chosen by me at around 2am too so don't read too much into it lol.

Shortly after making it I happened to notice that the website was apparently getting a fair amount of traffic according to Cloudflare. Cloudflare's metrics are notoriously inflated (due to genuine reasons) so I decided to add Google Analytics to the website, and it turns out that people were in fact sending it around to their friends to some extent. Huh.

A few weeks later, a few people suggested to add VPN adds as a half-joke. "There's no way a VPN company would actually approve of such an ad." I was incredibly torn but decided to submit it to a few companies and leave it to fate. If one actually approved of it, then I would try it for a bit for fun. A few more weeks pass and I get an email from a VPN company whose brand relates to a marine mammal approving of the idea. I let their sponsored ads run on the site for a few weeks essentially saying to try their VPN to avoid being "Jammed" in the future, but I noticed that there weren't many clicks, no one had purchased the VPN, and overall viewership declined. I decided to remove the ads after that. It was funny for a bit and made for a good story but it wasn't something I really wanted to do lol.

Question Mark

And more...

I do a lot of other things and have a lot of other projects too, although this list has most of the important ones already. I might add the rest sometime in the future.

In a nutshell, I run various bots that are mostly private, I have a few random joke websites a bit like We Are Jammin' running, I've made a bunch of custom software for the Content Creator Failboat's streams and Discord server, and some other junk too.

PikaDude art by Silvia
"ok landwalker"
Stats last updated 12/13/2024, 5:25:41 AM