Captain?

Inspiration

We were inspired by classic adventure games like Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as recent games like Detroit: Become Human and the Netflix adventure game Bandersnatch.

What it does

The game is run on a google home device, where the google home is the ship AI of a crashing spaceship. The player is the Captain of the ship and must make choices by verbally saying their next action to progress through the story.

How we built it

We used a google api called Dialogflow. However this was too limiting by itself, so we worked with javascript using a library called firebase to extend the functionality. This allows us to create dynamic responses, depending on past choices in the large tree. We used a large map of the story to create 'intentions' which are the events that allow the responses of the google home to branch. We use Google Cloud to host the project, and allows us to use any google device to access the game. It is what we use to give the google home access to the project.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges with the various limitations of Dialogflow. The firepase library has little documentation when it comes to errors, so we couldn't refer to past solutions when we ran into complicated bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of the game and it's writing. The dynamic responses were a major achievement.

What we learned

None of us had worked with javascript before, let alone made a project using it. Likewise none of us had worked with the Google Cloud before

What's next for Captain?

So far we have a demo version of the game, with around a third of the overall choices for the spaceship setting. We are considering expanding the game to other settings as well. The project is currently in alpha, and we hope to release a full version on the Google App Store

Built With

• javascript
• json