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How we created Will of Steel

· 5 min read
Neil
Neil
Owner
The Faboulous Dust
The Faboulous Dust
Owner

About us​

Before we tell you about the making of Will of Steel, let's introduce ourselves!

Neil​

I am Neil, a software engineer with a passion for gaming. I have been working on Discord bots for a while now and when Dust reached out to me, I was super excited to work on this project.

At that time, I was getting into strategy games, a famous game "Age of Empires II". It looked like a 20s game (it was released in 1999).

If you've looked at any of the announcements, you'd probably have seen me by now. I'm the one who's been working on the backend of the bot, making sure everything runs smoothly. Meanwhile, dust does all the frontend and design of the bot.

Dust​

Hello, hello, I'm the Fabolous Dust (intentionally misspelled) or you can just call me Dust. I've been a bit of a fan of Discord Bots and I tried to make my own strategy game in the form of a bot back in 2020 or something (which I miserably failed).

Since I was no good to do this alone, I thought of giving up. Until I contacted this intelligent man called Neil. We've been going pretty rock solid on the game and can say that this is the best (and most underrated the moment I'm writing this) game on entirety of Discord Bots Library.

I am usually doing the outside look of the bot and you can see me on the community server throwing rubies and stuff for free.

What do we do?​

We work on Will of Steel (obviously 😂). I do all the backend/programming and system administration to make sure Will of Steel is online for you all to play!

Meanwhile, Dust does all the frontend, design and the brain-work of thinking of new features and improvements for the bot. (I also do that but Dust is the main one 😂).

If you've ever used the bot, you've probably interacted with one of Dust's embed, image, and EVERYTHING!

How we created Will of Steel​

Now let's get into the making of Will of Steel!

Planning​

Dust first reached out to me about this crazy idea of a strategy game inside Discord on 06/04/2023. We chatted for a bit and then he explained the whole idea about the bot to me.

We had the first prototype of the bot ready by 07/10/2023. Will of Steel™️ was released to the public on 07/19/2023.

Development​

Development from then on was super fast. We had a TON of plans for the bot, so there was always something I wanted to do.

We released our first "update" on 08/06/2023. Almost a month after our release, this update introduced Alliances!

About 11 days after that, we hosted our first Event for India's Independence Day.

We released 3 updates in the span of 1 Month (September).

Update Cycle​

We never had a update cycle, we didn't have a day of each monh that we'd have to release update. We focus on quality more than quantity.

We've always been working hard trying to provide the best update for you guys. Nowadays, we're revisting old featuers to update & give our users a fresh look of every feature.

With that said, that doesn't mean we'll ignore updating the bot for months and saying "We're focusing on quality over quantity". We don't want to become Geometry Dash.

How do we do updates now?​

This is how we do updates now:

  1. We plan the update very cautiously. We think of everything that the user may want to do with the feature we're adding. Once we're done planning an update, we add it to our BackLog.

  2. Development Begins, usually takes a week for bigger updates, a day for smaller updates (I barely get sleep during this time 😂, seriously.)

  3. By this time, I've handed over the work to Dust to implement the frontend (through GitHub).

  4. Once Dust is done adding all the Frontend & Images, we vigorously test the features added, and perform a Quality Check on the update.

  5. Everything is done! This is the fun part, now, we release this update to you guys!

A downtime is planned for the release on our backend systems so that the Status Page automatically updates, I also let you guys know in the status channel once it's started.

Once we begin the update, we perform any database changes required, turn on the bot & announce the update!

Questions?​

First of all, thank you for reading the whole blog post. If you've still got some questions that you'd like answered, let us know by DMing any one of us on Discord or emailing us at office@willofsteel.me.