June 2019 update

June 8, 2019

It has been a while since I last posted, but the summer has kept my busy. I’ve had many issues with HTTPS on my website, and have resolved to temporarily disabling it so that the HTTP version is still available at least. The biggest project I’ve worked on since my last update has been my Telegram Arcade. I use the Telegram messenger a lot, and one feature that is fun about it is the HTML5 game support. There is incredibly little about this online, I haven’t found anyone posting about using this API. After spending a few hours with it, I found it incredibly frustrating, but I got it to work and have tried to make it easier for others to use it as well. A user well sent an inline message to your bot in the form of @ . Your bot will tell Telegram what games to show to the user. They will select one and Telegram sends a message in chat with a link to play that game. By clicking the play button, a request is made to your bot for a URL to play this game, and then the user is redirected to that URL. Your game must communicate with your bot to set the player’s score. When a score is set by your bot, Telegram will display it in the chat. My Telegram Arcade tries to take away all the hard work from setting this up. Telegram Arcade is both a telegram bot and a web server for HTML5 games setup in the same directory as the bot. Currently, it has a basic snake game and a stacker game. These games make an HTTP request back to the web server to update the score, but other than this the HTML files are just pure JS canvas games. I had a fun time getting this to work, and while the games I made with the bot are not great, they are a good proof of concept. I hope to get more games on the Telegram API, currently the only games I know of on the platform at hosted by @Gamee and @Gamebot.