Bob Was A Rectangle

Inspiration

We wanted to make a game to help COVID patients deal with social isolation during the pandemic. The natural choice was to make a game involving voice chat.

What it does

The player controls a character using keyboard commands and uses voice chat to ask Watson to interact with the levels. The voice commands allow Watson to help the player solve the puzzles that appear in the levels.

Challenges we faced

Fine-tuning the voice commands for the Watson AI was a bit tricky initially, but it didn't take long to get it implemented. Much of getting the game mechanics working and coming up with level designs came down to trial-and-error work that just took time to build. The final build into a standalone version also took some troubleshooting to finish.

How it was built

This game was built in Unity using the IBM Watson API with the Unity SDK. The scripting is written in C# and the game was formed entirely using assets within Unity.

What we learned

I was personally fairly new to Unity, so I learned a lot about the process it takes to go from ideation to finished product. A lot of the internal elements of Unity that we used for this project were new to me as well. As a team, we learned a lot about how to coordinate pushing changes to GitHub and how to distribute work on a game design.

Built With

Submitted to

HackGT 7
- Winner Emerging Hackers: Best in Curriculum Track

Created by

I worked mainly on level design and implementing objects into the levels. I learned about many Unity features, scripting, and level design concepts.

Kauri Salonvaara
I created a lot of the UI used in this project. I oversaw and helped managed the connections between the different teammate's code while guaranteeing everyone stayed on the same page.

James Reilly
I scripted the player movement and various objects in the environment, such as the doors, the lever, and the candles. In addition, I added certain mechanics such as music to the game.

Jake Smith
Getting Watson Integration working was smooth, for the most part. I did run into a slight problem when I polluted my namespace with duplicate method and class names to those in the IBM packages. It seems their nomenclature design is a bit too intuitive. The other major challenge was figuring out which trigger words were most consistent and easy-to-pronounce for triggering game actions. This was quite a bit of trial and error, thesaurus-digging, and not insubstantial frustration at Watson's occasionally strange interpretations. One thing we didn't get the time to fully implement but which I think would be valuable is tracking sentiment (based on verbal responses) over time during the game to look for early signs of emotional stress, boredom, or depression. I implemented a text-to-sentiment-csv-entry functionality based off the Tone Analysis API, which we would ideally use to plot user responses to particularly complex or collaboration-heavy sections of the game.

PL3B3

Updates

Kauri Salonvaara started this project — Oct 18, 2020 06:21 AM EDT

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