Quark — A Discord Bot That Guesses What You Are Thinking Of

This is a small project, and that is the honest framing

Five Python files, a Procfile, and a runtime.txt pinned to Python 3.8. It was last touched in February 2022 and it does one silly thing well: you think of a character, and a Discord bot guesses it.

It is worth writing down because of how little is in it.

The whole game is a library call

Akinator’s algorithm is not reimplemented here. The akinator.py package on PyPI owns the elimination logic; Akinator/akinator.py owns the Discord-shaped part, and that is where the actual work is:

aki = ak.Akinator()
q = aki.start_game()
while aki.progression <= 80:
    # ask q, take y / n / p / b, feed it back

The loop bound is progression, not a question count — Akinator decides when it is confident enough to guess, and the bot’s job is to keep asking until it says so. Answers are four keys: y, n, p for probably, and b to go back, which is why the input check is a list membership test rather than a parse.

Each question is posted as an embed with a zero-padded counter, so a twenty-question game does not render as Question - 1 through Question - 9 and then Question - 10 three lines lower.

Two cogs, one bot

quark.py is the client: a discord.py Bot with a ! prefix (mentioning it works too), help removed in favour of the embed shown on mention, and discord_components mounted for the button UI.

It loads two extensions. Akinator is the game above. ChatBot is a separate, much smaller thing — a plain requests call to a hosted chatbot API, guarded so it only answers in a guild and not in a DM. Two features, two cogs, and the interesting one does not stop the other from loading.

Deployed as a Heroku worker

worker: python quark.py

A long-lived process rather than a web dyno, because there is no HTTP surface — the only way in is the Discord gateway. runtime.txt pins python-3.8.12.

What I would fix first

The event handlers wrap their bodies in bare except: and except Exception: pass, which will swallow a genuine failure in a command and leave the user staring at silence. A discord.py command that raises already logs and reports itself; the broad catch was belt-and-braces that cost more in debuggability than it bought in uptime.

The second thing is that there is no test and no .env.example, and both would have cost about twenty minutes.