Skip to main content

Game for Alexa

I've been wanting to start work on a new game for a while and couldn't figure out which one. I was inspired by the Box Boss game by noodle cake and worked on a unity prototype for the web, while i was working on it i came across an interesting article about how amazon's alexa has become very popular and people are playing games on it and the developers are getting paid for developing interesting experiences for it. This sparked interest in me so wanted to give it a shot. The game that seems to be doing extremely well is Trivia, which isn't that surprising i guess as it's the easiest to get into on the VUI (Voice User Interface).

I thought about this for a while and realized that it would be easier to play a game if the options were limited, thats' when i realized that my Movie Rush game idea could work here.. the idea is to name two characters from a movie and ask the user to guess if they were friend / foe. Seems simple enough for a first try at a platform so i got started. Soon i realized that thinking for VUI is very different from thinking for GUI. The edge cases you handle here are a little different, what if the user says random stuff.. What if the user wants to stop.. these are all well defined and understood in GUI world VUI was pretty new and interesting to learn.

I quickly modified the facts skill that comes out of the box on Amazon Lambda to get the Friend or Foe game running. It was a fun exercise to figure out the experience and put it all together. I'm still trying to figure out ways to make the experience better, i even did a bunch of mocks for the icon for the store and decided on the icon. Currently im' working on putting together enough questions so its' interesting for the users at-least for a couple of hours.

Here are the sketches for the icon..
Sketches for the Friend or Foe Alexa Skill Icon

I finally settled on the Ninja symbol looking structure on the right side and did some experiments in Inkscape
Options i tried for the Icon
 
Final Icon FoF
The idea was to make it look like a two face but minimal, there are problems with this icon as it doesn't always look like a face with two eyes.. rather two swirling ghosts with mouths.. which is still fine till the Friend / Foe idea gets across.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Flash animations in GoDot Engine

If you have not heard about GoDot game engine,.. you should check it out right away.. godotengine.org Last time, i wrote a blog post about my experience making a simple physics game to GoDot Engine. Though there are a bunch of free options announced during the GDC this year, i thought ill' contribute to the engine. The one piece that is most important for game dev is the pipeline for the engine. One of the most common tools used for 2D animations is Flash. I have been using a library called Super Animation for almost all the games we've made for android at TMG. It's  a  free tool which lets you convert swf files to .sam files. This file can then be loaded in Cocos2Dx using the Open source loader library  https://github.com/raymondlu/super-animation-samples I thought it would be a good idea to port this cpp library to GoDot so that i understand how to write custom modules for the engine. This is the video of the module in action. I have expos...

Vehicle Physics (Godot 2D)

I've always been fascinated with the vehicle physics used in games. I played so many racing games / the hill climb games and every single time i would wonder wow that must be really hard to do. Thanks to the new generation of game development tools, developing physics based games has become almost a second nature to most people. I didn't want to be left out so i gave it a shot.. I tried setting up vehicle physics in GoDot Engine for a 2D vehicle. Here is what the vehicle scene looks like.. 2D vehicle setup in GoDot As you can see the body collision shape is not right but the rest of the stuff just works. The idea is simple think of what parts move along with the body vs what doesn't. I was kinda stuck setting up the pinJoint2D in GoDot, it actually clearly takes two nodes under the properties. This makes sure that the wheels are hinged to the DampingSpring2D. The Damping Spring2D takes two physics bodies(Body and the PinJoint2D) and makes it work like shock ab...

Gif Animation in Gimp

Ever wondered how to make a gif animation using gimp?? Hmm ofcourse you did.. well even if you did not.. it would be good to know how simple gif animations can be made in this Free image editing software. Here is a sample of what can be achieved. Yes it looks crude.. but i made it in less than 20mins.. so i guess its valid :) any way.. coming to how we do it.. open gimp, create a new image, press ctrl+l this will bring up the layers dialog. In this layers dialog you are provided options to create delete, move the layers. So keep adding layers, each with the next image in the animation sequence. Want to check how your animation looks?? go to filters->animation->playback this will launch a dialog box which has playback, rewind and step buttons on it. Click on playback button and you will see how your animation looks. Satisfied?? just save the animation with an extension ".gif" ..you have to note that while saving you will be asked if you want the different layers to be mr...