Freeze Dancers

Inspiration

There was a blizzard and our 3 year old got her hands on some chocolate. We had to get all that energy out!

What it does

Freeze Dancers is our wacky version of the classic Freeze Dance game. In our version Alexa tells the kids how to dance (like a monkey, while doing a scary face, while howling at the moon, etc.) They have to dance and freeze fast when the music stops. We modified the rules a bit so no one loses and all the kids can dance together until they get tired. Our challenge was to create an engaging, lengthy experience for a game that originally has a very simple mechanism. Our current early analytics show that a user plays an average of 17 (!) rounds before they stop, which we find incredible.

How I built it

I used storyline.io

Challenges I ran into

Game design

In the original game, the judge plays and pauses the music and also decides which kids are out. We debated how to adapt the latter part to Alexa as she can't see :) We decided to have Alexa ask which players moved to create some excitement between the players, have them tell on each other, and be more aware to what happened. In the original game kids often get sad that they have to sit down after losing, and since the objective of this game is to make kids happy we changed the rules so Alexa encourages the kids to try again and the kids can just keep going.

Music

It took a while to find fun danceable music in the public domain and to manage all the music files.

Video

Unfortunately, a huge challenge was getting our shy family to agree to be posted on youtube dancing like frogs, so the video features our alternative puppet family. They don't dance as funny but at least they follow instructions :)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was a really fun skill to create. We developed it together as a family, thinking about the rules, the music, and what Alexa might say. Our 3 year old came up with some of the dance moves herself. The skill is a really fun family game and creating it was an incredible learning experience for our family. As mentioned above, analytics show that we've been successful at creating a lengthy, pleasurable experience which we're very proud of!

What I learned

We all learned how to freeze dance really well! Technically we learned how to create an engaging yet simple Alexa skill with a small decision tree, a loop, an api for the music files, and random phrases.

What's next for Freeze Dancers

Seeing how engaging this game is, we plan to enrich the experience with many more dance moves and music files!

Thank you for reading and happy dancing!

Contact: Pretzel.Voice@gmail.com

Built With

• thestoryline.io