Impossible Trivia

What it does

Impossible Trivia asks up to twenty true or false questions from several popular trivia categories. The game is structured such that if the player misses a question, the game ends. The questions have been designed so that the average person would get approximately half of the questions correct making beating the game very challenging. After each try, players are told which rank they achieved in the mob ranging from Rat to Godfather.

The inspiration

Having played multiple trivia games on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, I wanted to design a game with high-quality content and the lowest possible friction. Trivia games are quite popular on these platforms and I was hopeful that if I designed a quality experience I could attract and retain users.

How I built it

I was able to use Alexa-hosted for my back end. The questions are original and I utilized Pro Tools music software for recording and Audacity to achieve the right file format for Alexa.

Challenges I ran into

Originally, I wanted to use Firebase for my question database. However, Firebase does not easily integrate with Alexa so I struggled for a couple weeks on this.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Users have told me that the questions are high quality and that they learn something from the answers. And, although I have been developing on Google Assistant for several years, this is my first significant effort on Alexa.

What I learned

I appreciate the effort that Amazon has put into ISP--from the initial setup to the code sample to the instructional videos. I also commend Amazon for focusing on the success of the developer. I also enjoyed working with the Alexa-hosted backend and the native code editor.

What's next for Impossible Trivia

I would like to create some kind of daily leaderboard. Because of the structure of the game, the distribution of scores should be such that it is possible that a single person could be a daily leader even with thousands of people playing per day. I would also like to potentially offer questions exclusively from certain categories such as sports, geography, music, etc. Having some visual questions for Echo Show users is also an ambition.

Built With

• alexa-hosted
• audacity
• google-storage
• node.js
• obs-studio
• pro-tools