Dr. Monopoly

Monopoly: anytime, anywhere.

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Inspiration

We wanted to play Monopoly anytime, anywhere. This is possible with the help of Google Assistant, which eliminates the need for the traditional set of a board, tokens, and cards. Voice-assisted software is incredibly applicable to board games, virtual or otherwise. We anticipate that digital assistants will gradually be included when purchasing physical board games, and Dr. Monopoly takes this a step further by allowing users to play.

What it does

Our assistant, Dr. Monopoly, guides multiple players through a complete Monopoly game. From buying properties to passing Go and collecting $200, you can play Monopoly with any Google Assistant-enabled device. The assistant will warn you when you try to make any illegal moves, and will do all the maintaining of state for you, including annoying financial computations, and keeping track of who owns which properties.

How we built it

We took advantage of the Google Cloud Platform by using Dialogflow to build our Actions for the Google Home Mini. Monopoly is a structured board game with clear phases and available user. The lack of ambiguity meant the natural-language interface of Dialogflow was a great fit for our project. We initially used MySQL to construct a database before taking advantage of the Google Cloud Platform’s database capabilities. Firebase was used for creating our custom fulfillments.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had never used DialogFlow before, and we also ran into issues with connecting the device (that were eventually resolved.) We better understand the intricacies of coding an intelligent chatbot, by adopting the DialogFlow lingo of creating user commands "intents", which trigger actions "fulfillments', and having certain special queries that required parameters that we would get by "slot-filling". The most complicated idea was "contexts", with which we are able to code any flow of logic in a conversation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned how to create an interactive, multi-player game in DialogFlow without any templates. We figured out how to use a MySQL database & JavaScript Object Notation in conjunction to create a game logic engine. We learned to create intelligent voice feedback system on the base of Google Assistant System. We applied non-traditional approaches to resolve the problems we had faced. We had fun so much fun!

What we learned

Google Cloud Platform PaaS, DialogFlow API, JavaScript & JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), MySQL Database Commands, Google Voice Recognition, Google Firebase Platform, Github Version Control System (VCS)

What's next for Dr. Monopoly

Monopoly: VR Edition. Also, allowing users to modify the standard rules however they desire (like changing property prices to reflect inflation)

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