Animal Guessing Game

Test your animal knowledge with this skill! Can you guess the animal based on its description? Play to find out.

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Inspiration

I wanted to create a fun, interactive game that tests your knowledge of animals. I think Animal Guessing Game is a great way to learn about animals and some interesting facts about them.

What it does

Animal guessing game is a skill that tests your knowledge of animals.

When you begin Animal Guessing Game you will be given a choice of difficulty level: easy, medium or hard. Once you choose a difficulty, you will be given a description of an animal, and you have four changes to guess what the animal is. You can say “repeat”, or “repeat description” to hear the description of the animal again. If you guess the animal incorrectly you are first given the description of the animal again, and if your next guess is incorrect, you will be given a hint.

This Skill also contains in-skill purchasing for an Animal Facts Package This facts package will tell you interesting facts about the animal guessed.

This skill now features visuals and touch for screen supported/based devices such as the Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, and others.

How I built it

I developed this skill using Node JS, DynamoDB for data persistence, and hosting the code on AWS Lambda. I used Adobe Illustrator to draw vector images of all of the animals in the skill.

Challenges I ran into

I realized very quickly that it is more challenging than you would think to write descriptions of animals that give enough information that it could be guessed, but also not enough that it would be guessed too easily. It was also a challenge to write descriptions that coincided with the different difficulty levels appropriately.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As someone who does not consider themselves a programmer, I am proud of how far I have come in my programming abilities to be able to develop this skill. I am also very satisfied with the final product, and proud of making a fun game.

What I learned

I learned how to use APL to create a more visually interactive skill. Adding multimodal responses to Animal Guessing Game and the need for images of the animals gave me the final motivational push to learn Adobe Illustrator.

What's next for Animal Guessing Game

I will continue to periodically add more animals to the skill. Given the numerous species of animals there are, there will always be more that can be added to the skill. And as more animals get added, the difficulty of guessing less common animals increases, so future updates may include guessing from multiple choice answers.

Future updates may include adding a scoring system and leaderboard to make the game more competitive.

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