Escape the Room

Inspiration

After attending some real Escape Rooms, I was really fascinated with the idea and wanted to see if I could bring it to Alexa. People love solving puzzles in escape rooms with their friends and family, so I thought Alexa could be a perfect way to make this sort of experience accessible to anyone!

What it does

Escape the Room is a virtual escape room. You have a number of different rooms that you can choose from (The Office, The Car, The Jail Cell, and The Garage) and after the scene is set for you, it is up to you to escape on your own. You need to search around the room for clues and items to make your escape. Along the way you might need to break windows, listen carefully to tape recordings, and more! For those who get stuck, contextual hints are available to help the user escape.

APL has been integrated into this skill to provide an even better experience for those that have devices with screens! The screen will show you a themed background with a scene specific to your current room, and show you icons for your inventory as well as a timer tracking how long your escape has taken! These features such as showing the inventory help the user remember what they have done in a visual way, without requiring them to keep all that information in their heads.

How I built it

I had originally built this skill using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK v1. For this hackathon, I rewrote the skill from scratch using a new framework, Jovo V2, redesigning the whole user experience and implementing new multi modal features with APL. I also translated the skill into German!

Challenges I ran into

Alexa is supported on so many different types of devices which made it a challenge to make my display templates work on each one. As I was developing, I had an Echo Show, Echo Spot, and Fire TV cube by my side to make sure that every change I made worked properly on every device. While this was time consuming and a slow process, in the end it made sure that my skills were optimized for any type of device!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of being able to create a skill that people enjoy spending time on. Seeing some reviews of people enjoying playing for hours and then asking for more rooms after finishing them all makes me proud and exciting to keep on working on this project!

What I learned

I've learned how important the voice user interface is to users. It is extremely important to do lots of user testing and figure out all the pain points that users will encounter. Part of the process of rewriting this skill from scratch involved testing with friends and family and fixing any issues that they encountered until I removed all the friction from the experience. I've also learned how difficult it is to localize a Skill! When getting this translated into German I discovered that you can't really just copy and paste. All the nouns needed to have genders attached to them so I could dynamically create the correct messages when the user interacts with things in the room. In addition to this, I had to rework many of the puzzles so that they would actually make sense in another language. Anything clues that revolved around letters and spelling didn't translate perfectly to German so I needed to create separate puzzles and clues.

What's next for Escape the Room

I want to release this skill to as many countries in as many languages as possible. People seem to be enjoying the skill, so I want to make this skill available to as many people as possible! I also wish to expand every further on the APL and hire a designer to produce more and more visual content that I can incorporate into the game!

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• apl
• dynamodb
• jovo
• lambda
• mysql
• node.js