Hello World!
My name is Huckleberry, and I have been working on Platypus (or a version of it) since the beginning of this year. I am developing this platform to give organized communities a way to ... well... stay organized.
Some backstory:
Back in December of last year, I was looking for an awards bot for a milsim community I am in. I found plenty, but none that did what I needed. The awards bots I found used activity level within Discord to hand out participation trophies. Nothing wrong with participation trophies, it just isn't something I was in the market for. The community plays games and we want to award people for actions in game. Also, what is the point in getting an award if you can't show it off?
By January I said, "Fuck it! We'll do it live!" and began my first foray into coding a bot. This bot would handle custom awards, and profiles. Due to ADHD and other personal reasons, the scope of the bot crept out of control and before you know it, the bot handled awards, profiles, training pipelines, events management, voice channel management, moderation, support tickets, and more.
What I ended up creating was a bot to replace the other bots we were using in that community as well as creating a bot that did exactly what was needed. When I showed my friends and testers, they thought I should make that bot for the general public, because they wanted that bot for their community. Thus Platypus was born. I had to recreate that prototype bot from scratch, due to the guild-specific nature of that bot.
What is Platypus?
Platypus is designed for organized communities, whether you are an EVE corp, WoW guild, ARMA unit, or a jogging group. It is more than a bot, it is a platform. I like to think of the platform like an Oreo; One cookie is the Discord Bot, the other cookie is the web dashboard, and the cream filling is the database that holds the two together.
Why Platypus?
I chose Platypus because, like this platform will eventually do, a platypus has a bit of everything. A platypus has a bunch of features that work together to form a functional animal. This platform will do stuff that no other bots do (that I have found), and it will do things that other bots can do, but integrated. The differing features can talk to each other, unlike the 3-5 bot combo most communities use. There are great bots out there, but if you have a bot for moderation, and a bot for events, and a bot for this and a bot for that - none of them talk to each other. Platypus features will communicate with each other to form an integrated functional platform. For example: You can set up a highly customizable training event in Discord for a qualification. The event can spin up a temporary voice channel for that event when its time; the platform will know who is in that event, and when the event is over, a qualification from that event can automatically be awarded to the attendees upon approval. If you had an event bot and a temp voice bot and an award bot, you would have to handhold that information from bot to bot, or keep track of everything in a spreadsheet.
Who is behind Platypus?
Just me, Huckleberry. I am the main and only developer. I lost my job earlier this year and took the leap into starting my own business. It is scary to venture out on my own like this, but I like what I am doing and who I am doing this for, so it makes pushing through that fear easy. I have plenty of friends who have volunteered to be testers and you may see them around in our support Discord to help answer questions or respond to issues as they arise.
At the end of the day, I want to make a bot that adds value to you and your community. That is my personal goal with this platform, and I will strive to accomplish that during development and beyond.
-Huck
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