How to build Telegram bot (with the GAME Typescript SDK)

Hello! Today we're going to guide you how to build a telegram bot using an easy-to-use plugin from the GAME SDK. You'll be chatting with your telegram bot by the end of the tutorial!

1. Register a new telegram bot with telegram

First, we're going to register a new telegram bot. Go to your Telegram account and DM @BotFather

In the chat with the BotFather, click /start and click /newbot! It will guide you through creating a new bot. First, give your bot a name (it doesn't have to be unique and you can change this anytime.) Then, BotFather will ask you to give the bot a unique username. The username must end in "bot." And the username cannot be changed. A bot's username can look like this: - my_agent_bot - myAgentBot - myAgent_Bot or any combination of the above!

Once you've set the name and username of your bot, the BotFather will give you an API key. Save it, we will use it in our project :)

By the way, while we are here, you can also edit your bot anytime! Click or type in /mybots and you'll get to a menu where you can edit your bot's name anytime and set your bot's image and description. You do not have to do any of this right now to complete this tutorial.

2. Git clone repo

Now, let's go to our dev environment and git clone the game-node repository.

// clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/game-by-virtuals/game-node

// go to the plugin directory
cd game-node/plugins

Now, we are in the plugins folder. There are a few awesome ones here that you can play with right away - such as the discordPlugin, twitterPlugin and the onChainActionsPlugin (where you can handle crypto wallets and do on-chain transactions.) But for today, we will just focus on the telegramPlugin.

At the moment of this tutorial, we recommend you to be on node version 23 and npm version 10.9.2. We recommend the node version manager, NVM.

Let's go into the telegramPlugin folder and install the dependencies.

// go into the telegram plugin folder
cd telegramPlugin

// install dependencies
npm install

We are going to run the example code that comes in the telegramPlugin. Open src/example.ts. Replace <BOT_TOKEN> with the Telegram API key that we generated from the BotFather.

Replace <API_TOKEN> with your GAME API key. If you do not have one, you can generate one here: https://console.game.virtuals.io/

In the example.js file

The example file actually contains three agents. There is an autoReply agent, a financial agent, and a nutritionist agent. When we run this program, all three agents will run at the same time and they will all try to respond to you!

When you are modifying this program, you can delete all but one agent. You can customize your agent by changing the name, goal, and description!

3. Run the program

Great! Now that you've entered your GAME API key and the bot token, we are ready to run the code.

At this point, you can edit the agents in the example.ts file. The example comes with three agents (a generic autoReply agent, a financial agent, and a nutrionist agent) you can par the code down to just one agent. Give your agent some personality and specialty by editing the name, goal, and description.

Let's compile the typescript. Edit the package.json so that the script for "tsup" will compile example.ts instead of index.ts. Save the changes.

In the terminal, run the following commands:

// install dependencies
npm install

// this command compiles the example.ts
// and places it in a new "dist" folder
npm run tsup

// run the compiled example.js
node dist/example.js