Inspiration
Well, probably everything started in those days when we were younger and read Choose Your Own Adventure books like the LONE WOLF series from Joe Dever and played games like MONKEY ISLAND, MANIAC MANSION and INDIANA JONES. Later we discovered other really great games like MASS EFFECT, THE LAST OF US or UNTIL DAWN. Each of them with their own intriguing choices and thrilling story concepts. When Alexa emerged in Germany we did not need to discuss what kind of skills to develop for such a device.
And here we are, telling interactive stories and creating new worlds for our users, where the choices they make are meant to have impact. Not only on the stories and the different endings they can achieve, but on the users themselves as well. We want them to identify with the story and to build up relationship with the characters they meet in them, and we want them to make a lot of great or difficult decisions so that they get emotionally involved and truly participate.
What it does
"Der Zauberwald" is an interactive audiobook for children from the age of 6 to 11 years. The skill contains three episodes at the moment which you can choose freely, well, maybe you should start with the first anyway. As a user you enter the "Zauberwald" (magic forest) and get to know the old and wise speaking tree Woodwart and his friend, a little young bear by the name of Siggi who wears a bunny costume. Along with Siggi you will experience several adventures, like going on a treasure hunt, discovering the secret of the Rainbow River and bringing back its colors and undertaking a trip to buy the most famous Magic Forest Honey for Siggi. The stories are exciting but humorous and cheerful.
How we built it
We have created a browser based authoring tool with which we can design, plan and write interactive stories. It also enables us to make more complex games by using variables so that choices of the user have more or even delayed impact on the story. By doing so we can generate a vivid and living world in which your choices earlier in the game have consequences on later parts. We can build up pressure by giving users only 10 choices to find their way out of a labyrinth. We can implements attributes like strength or health or reputation. All of their choices affect those values and that leads to different branches when our engine checks on the values achieved on certain story points.
Challenges we ran into
When we finally decided to take part in the competition, we just were recovering from a tour de force (especially the participation in the Alexa Game Skill Contest 2018 for Germany and the UK), so everything we did had to happen really quick and we were already on our last legs. Taking part in this contest now was really a challenge, as we had to write the third episode, translate all of the episodes and having them proofread and recorded as audio files. Additionally, we had to create the skill covers and solve certain technical issues. So, like in our stories, at the beginning we made a choice which lead to a lot of other choices and as the contest is not over now, we still do not know which end we will achieve. We kind of like this :-)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We succeeded in getting everything ready just before the deadline. Why sleep, when you can write, or draw or program something? Also, we brought together another episode of "Zauberwald" for the first time and combined this with implementing covers for Echo Show and Echo Spot. Sadly, we did not get everything done that we planned for, but we are still satisfied with the results.
What we learned
We learned never again to decide on participating in a contest when we are already exhausted and only have like 10 days left to submit the skill. Well, probably it will happen again anyway... What we truly learned is...
What's next for The Magic Forest
We are looking forward to having many more of our authors to continue writing on "Der Zauberwald". We have built up an interesting world and some fascinating characters which children in Germany really love. Now a lot of writers are interested to explore and change the world by themselves. Hopefully, this will result in a lot more episodes to come in the near future and also on even more variation as each of them brings his own ideas into the world.
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