Alexa Game Development and Season Three

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Now that Skyring is out and Season Two of our game development show is wrapped up, it’s time to start thinking about Season Three. We did post a video update for those of you on Youtube, so if you haven’t seen it yet, here is where you can go to catch up with what we’ve done and where we’re planning to go. Hint: Amazon Alexa Game Development.

Some of you have mentioned that it might be more interesting if we played around a bit with different technologies, so that is what we are going to do. Our first target is to get a game working on Amazon’s Alexa. The Batman-based game, Wayne Investigation is one example of something that can be done with Alexa, and, after a little experimenting, it looks like we should be able to pull the technology side of it off, as long as we can pull off the game and voice acting side. Thankfully, we’re not making a Batman game, so we don’t have to inflict Eric’s “I’m Batman” voice on you.

We followed two tutorials to see what could be done with Alexa. The first, by Noelle LaCharite, can be found here. It gives a pretty clear guide on how to get a project up and running in Alexa that has branching paths. We did run into a few snags – particularly with where to do the “npm install”, but we managed to find workarounds and go through everything that needs to be done in part one of our Alexa game development setup videos.

The essential steps are:

  1. Install Node.js
  2. Set up an Amazon Developer account
  3. Set up an Amazon Web Services account (for access to Lambda)
  4. Grab the files from github (Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js and Decision Tree Example)
  5. Follow the tutorial to get things installed, with special steps for Windows

And all of the links you need are here:

Then, we take on a little extra challenge and follow another tutorial, this time by Robert Jamison, which can be found here. Unfortunately, the tutorial is designed for Mac OS, so we had to do a little exploring on how to get everything working in Windows, but we do succeed, and we also manage to figure out how to add custom voice through mp3 files to boot. There are quite a few steps involved, so be warned, but you can see how we did it in part two of our Alexa game development setup videos.

The essential steps are:

  1. Install Node.js
  2. Install Audacity
  3. Install git tools for Windows
  4. Set up an Amazon Developer account
  5. Set up an Amazon Web Services account
  6. Grab the files from github
  7. Follow the tutorial to get things installed
  8. Convert mp3 files in Audacity to the right format
  9. Host the mp3 files under an https address
  10. Add audio tags to your project for custom voice

And all of the links you need are here:

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