As I did in 2020, I wanted to review some projects I worked on in 2021 as I plan out what to do in 2022. Most of these projects have detailed blog posts on this site. I keep a running archive of my apps at my App Hub. This list is ordered by what I find the most to least interesting.

1: Mystery Mansion App

At the end of the year, over the holiday break in December, I took some time to create a Python 3 app to replace the electronic version of an old 90s board game. In that board game, you search a randomly-generated mansion for hidden money as a talking device narrates the game and tells you what you find. This project uses a lot of careful randomization and some odd features like text-to-speech. Hopefully I can find some similar small-ish projects in 2022.

It was a fun game to reverse engineer, and I hope to return to this project to introduce a UI (beyond command-prompt), more game modes, and maybe even a browser version. I also found some other projects on GitHub that accomplish the same ends, so I may see if I can research those to find any tricks I may have missed.

2: Vaudeville Mews Bot

I’ve made a number of Twitter Bots over the past year, the most popular of which is the new “Today at the Vaudeville Mews” Twitter Bot. The Vaudeville Mews is a local venue that recently closed during the pandemic. Previously, I wrote a Python script to scrape the venue’s website for historical show data and then built an archive for the data. I knew I wanted to do more with the project, but I had run out of Twitter Bots for my phone number. Turns out, you can only have 10 Twitter Developer Accounts (required for bots) for a single phone number.

I “recruited” a friend who was also interested in this project to let me use their phone number and finally completed the Bot piece. The Bot runs a handful of times a day and writes tweets about shows from that day in previous years. It has taken off a lot compared to other projects I’ve worked on, and its also one that feels “done” as it is. It could be nice to add an archive of photos or other content, but at this point that feels unnecessary (and probably beyond the purpose of a Bot).

I’m eager to find similar gaps where a Bot tied to Web Scraping Data may come in handy.

3: Candidate Sites One & Two

In 2021 I worked on a couple of websites for political candidates. These were done as In-Kind Contributions (I think that’s the term, I’m not a lawyer) or donated services, but treated as freelance work. I am glad I got to use my software skills for these projects and hope to find more freelance type work in the future.

4: Phasmaphobia Helper

I created a helper app for the video game Phasmaphobia, in which you discover evidence to deduce the kind of ghost that is haunting the location you’re investigating. This was a fairly simple app, just a single screen, and I actually used it with friends quite a bit so it went through some real rounds of feedback. It also had to be occasionally updated as the game added more ghost types. I’m really happy with how this turned out, and hope to continue finding projects like this that I can actually get feedback to improve.

5: Maintenance

The least “interesting” but vital, now that I have a number of live apps I have to find ways to keep maintaining them. In addition to routine checks that the Bots are Tweeting and the websites are up and running, I also try to add some amount of content each week between the Bots, the Order in the Court game, and other apps. This could really use a whole project, some way to organize and automate these checks.

Bonus: Bot Review!

In addition to reviewing the year’s projects, I wanted to check on the status of my bots:

The Clue Bot

The Clue Bot has 20 followers and has run through 293 mysteries. The most common solutions include The Balcony, Elizabeth Bloodwell, and Poison.

Stories from Another Universe

Stories from Another Universe has 31 followers.

The Quest Bot

The Quest Bot has 35 followers and has run through 27 heroes. The most successful hero has been Felicia Abadon, who reached Level 10, completed 12 quests, and lasted 482 updates.

Today at the Vaudeville Mews

Today at the Vaudeville Mews has 75 followers.

Order in the Court

Order in the Court (not fully a bot, but uses one) has 11 followers and run 75 cases.