Guide/Bot Making Techniques

INTRODUCTION

After my first guide on character writing, I didn’t really think I’d do any more guides, but I got bored again and decided to write a guide about the actual creation of bots on the site. These aren’t necessarily “pro tips”, just some things I’ve learned from my time.

GETTING STARTED

Obviously, to create a bot, you’re gonna need a character or scenario to make. This guide is more tailored towards single characters. For multiple characters, you can use any of these multiple times in the personality separated by a horizontal line (“---” in markdown). Either way, you’ll need the character in mind, a scenario for the character to be in, and the ability to translate information about the character into the personality. For OCs, if you can’t draw, you’ll just wanna use an AI image generator. I use NovelAI’s image generator since I bought a bunch of credits for it when I was younger, but I’ve heard of some other websites that work just as well. Namely, pix.ai (i think that’s what it is). If your character is from a different source material (manga, anime, show, game, etc.), then I’d recommend a screen cap of the character from the source material. Either way, this is the easy part.

PERSONALITY TECHNIQUE 1: WIKI PASTING

This technique is done by just putting information about the character into the bot definition. For non-OC characters, this is done by going to the wiki page of the character and pasting the text into the bot definition. It looks something like this:

John Chess is a 26-year-old male chess player from London. He’s a 5-time international champion who plays chess to get money and use it to buy himself a house, since he lives with his parents.

John Chess is a tall, skinny man who looks like your typical nerd. He’s very bald with a head that looks like you can spit-shine it and piercing blue eyes. He often wears a very fancy suit at his chess games with a grey tuxedo, a white dress shirt, and chartreuse pants.

John Chess is very cocky and confident in his chess skills, making him either very formidable or very easy to beat depending on the opponent.

While I personally don’t use these since it gives very little information about the character’s speech patterns and is hard to organize, not to mention the bot could get some parts of the character’s personality wrong, it’s still a good place to start for someone who hasn’t made a bot before.

PERSONALITY TECHNIQUE 2: GOBBLEDYGOOK

I don’t really have a name for this technique, nor do I know if there’s an official name for it. I’m calling it “gobbledygook” because it’s hard to decipher at a first glance. However, it’s very simple when you actually get into it. Here’s an example:

{{char}} Basic Info(“Name(“John Chess”)” + “Age(“26”)” + “Gender(“Male”)” + “Race(“Human(“British”)”)” + “Classification(“World-class chess player”)”)

{{char}} Appearance(“Body(“Tall” + “Skinny”)” + “Hair(“Bald”)” + “Eyes(“Sharp” + “Blue”)” + “Attire(“Gray tuxedo jacket” + “White dress shirt” + “Chartreuse dress pants”)”)

{{char}} Personality(“General(“Confident in his skills at chess” + “Socially awkward outside of chess events” + “Self-conscious”)” + “Likes(“Chess” + “Chinese food” + “Winning”)” + “Dislikes(“Bugs” + “Needles”)”)

You can add as many sections as you want, just separate them with a line break and head them with “{{char}} Section” if you decide to add more.

PERSONALITY TECHNIQUE 3: INTERVIEW

This is my favorite personality creating technique and I think is the best. It removes the need for example dialogue and still portrays as much info as the two above methods. The only downside is that you need to be able to speak in-character as the bot in question in order to do it. For an example, just look at literally any bot I’ve made in the past month or 2. I’m too lazy to make another example since I use this technique so much.

INITIAL MESSAGES

Initial messages are personally the hardest part for me of making a character. Making an initial message good and giving the user the freedom to go about the scenario how they want means presenting the character to the user without forcing interaction or making the circumstances feel forced. If you want a good example of an initial message, look at my first Rei bot. It sets up an interaction without outright forcing it. If you want an example of what I wouldn’t recommend doing, look at my first Lily bot. The interaction with her feels forced. If you’re doing a scenario where the user is supposed to interact with the character from the beginning, then disregard this.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Well, these are most of the strategies I use. I have some other ones, but this has already gone on long enough, so I like to end it here. I hope this helps you make your own bots so you can satisfy your needs if mine suck too much. Uh… I don’t know how to end this off, so… the song of the day is Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. It slaps.

Signed,

- en-US-Declan.csv