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Discord Plays Pokemon!

This is an application written in Node.JS to play Game Boy Advance games through Discord. The application runs an instance of a Game Boy Advance emulator (GBA.js) on the server side, receives inputs from a specified Discord text channel using Discord.js, and sends the video output to a web interface via Socket.io. This application was developed for the purpose of playing Pokemon collaboratively, but can certainly be used for other games.

Installation

Clone the repository to your desired location, and run

npm install

Then, make the directories roms/ and saves/, and place your ROMs in the roms/ directory. Then, copy .env.example to .env, and fill out the entries according to the following section. Finally, run

node src/index.js

and view the web interface at the specified port.

Configuration

You will first need to create a Discord bot on the Discord Developer portal, and give it permissions to read text channels. Then, invite the created bot to your server, and record the token.

  • ACTION_INTERVAL Number of milliseconds between queued actions.
  • ALLOW_EMOTES Whether or not to allow emotes to send.
  • ANONYMOUS_MODE When set to 1, web interface will not display Discord usernames in the input log.
  • DISCORD_ADMIN_IDS Provide a string containing the user IDs of all users you would like to have admin access.
  • DISCORD_CHANNEL_ID Provide the channel ID of the Discord text channel where inputs will be read from.
  • DISCORD_GUILD_ID Provide the server ID on which the bot will listen.
  • DISCORD_TOKEN Provide the bot token from above.
  • EMOTE_PREFIX Character(s) to precede emote commands.
  • FRAMERATE The number of frames that the server sends to each client per second. Does not control the emulator built-in framerate. Setting this above 15 may cause issues.
  • MAX_ACTIONS_QUEUED Maximum number of actions that can be queued to be sent to the emulator.
  • MAX_REPEAT Maximum number of actions that can be simultaneously in the queue from one sender.
  • PORT The port on which to run the web application.
  • ROM_NAME The filename of the ROM to run.
  • SAVE_DIR The name of the directory where the savegames will be made.
  • SAVE_SLOT_DEFAULT The save slot which is loaded by default.

Usage

Enter any of the valid keypresses to submit that keypress to the emulator. Valid keypresses can be found in the --HELP command.

  • --HELP Show a help message.
  • --INFO Show information regarding the emulator.
  • --SAVE Save the current storage to file, under the active save slot.
  • --SAVE # Save the current storage to file, under the specified save slot.
  • --LOAD Load a blank save state.
  • --LOAD # Load the specified save state.
  • --EMOTES List the available emotes.

WARNING: For Pokemon games, you must first save within the game, then call --SAVE to save the game memory to file.

Furthermore, repeated button presses are supported. For example, the command A2 will send A two times to the emulator. More complex commands can be built using parentheses, such as (LR)10 to walk repeatedly to the left and right.

Emotes are also supported, and should be placed (in any image format) in src/public/assets/emotes.

Deep Integration

The file MemoryReader.js accesses the emulators RAM to parse out game data in a human-readable format. This data can be viewed using the commands --PARTY, --PARTY #, or on the web interface at /pro.

Roadmap

The following are features that we hope to add in the future:

  • Allow multiple savestates.
  • Limit to one connection per IP, to save bandwidth/prevent DDOS.
  • Deep integration to pull game data from RAM.
  • Display deep integration party data on front-end in real time.
  • Make repeated button presses easier (i.e., A*10).
  • Add emotes.
  • Make front-end pretty.
  • Autosave functionality.
  • Democracy mode.