Life RPG - Alexa Life Hacks

Inspiration

We created Life RPG because we find routines boring and hard to keep up. Current habit tracking apps are useful, but tracking the habits themselves becomes another routine.

We want to create a habit tracker that is fun, engaging, and motivating.

Enter Life RPG where we transport people into an alternate dimension with stats such as health, strength, intellect, and experience.

What it does

The point system is similar to a role playing game where the best players stand on top of the leaderboard. Users are incentivised to do their best to increase their stats. And how they do so? By exercising.

We added common exercises such as push ups, leg lifts, squats, high knees, and much more! This is perfect for study breaks and getting a bit more oxygen in our brains. We also added intellectual questions on science topics so users learn about physics, chemistry, and biology. We included a health statistics section to increase users’ awareness of health facts and myths. Finally, we made habits into quests. You can set a goal, such as yoga, jogging, or meditating, as a quest, and if you complete the quest daily, you will gain a streak and bonus experience. More experience allows you to get new avatars, brag about your position on the leaderboard, and get a sense of fulfillment.

In summary, we found life a bit boring, and we spiced it up by creating an Alexa skill that gamifies life to make life as fun as playing a video game. Ultimately, we want our skill to motivate people to become fit, smart, healthy, responsible, and overall, a better person.

Sample Interactions

Here are a few sample interactions.

"Alexa, start Life RPG."

"Looks like it's your first time playing Life RPG! Welcome!"
"Do you want to be a watermelon, a strawberry, a cabbage, or broccoli?"

"I want to be a watermelon."

"Congratulations. You are now a wonderful watermelon. "
"Now, what is your name?"

"My name is [blank]."

"Your name is [blank], you can train to improve your stats, log your daily quests, check your stats, compete in events to get special trophies... Now, what do you want to do?"

"Train my strength."

"Start doing [exercise] for 30 seconds <audio>. Congratulations! Your strength has increased by a point. Now, what would you like to do?"

"Train my intellect."

"What is the formula for density? A. Mass over volume. B. Mass over area. C. Volume over mass."

"The answer is [A]."

"You are right! Your intellect has increased by 1 point. What would you like to do now?"

"Train my health."

"Did you know tea can reduce your risk of heart attacks?"

"Start [yoga] quest."

"Your new quest is [yoga]. Now ..."

"I did [yoga]."

"You have completed [yoga] quest. Your experience increased by 1 point. Now ..."

"Join [dragon] event."

"Welcome to the dragon event. You will be asked to do ..."
"You are running up the dragon hill. Do high knees for 30 seconds..."
"You are attacking the dragon. Swing your arms for 30 seconds..."
"The dragon is on the ground, how will you defeat the dragon? A. Shake its hands. B ..."

"Check my stats."

"Here are your stats. Health. [x points]. Intellect. [x points]. Strength. [x points]. Experience. [x points]. Now ..."

How we built it

We built it on Amazon Lambda with Node.JS, Amazon S3, DynamoDB, and the Alexa Skills Kit.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges converting audio into an Alexa supported format. We also had trouble working with DynamoDB tables because the tables lag a bit when integrated with Alexa. Lastly, we went through a lot of hurdles working on a display interface for our skill.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Life RPG works! Though it is not in its final form, we are proud that we managed to put it together in a few weeks of intense after school and weekend meetings.

What we learned

Amazon Alexa has a lot of potential. Voice skills are like the next generation of smartphone apps. However, voice skills do have their negatives, and one is that they are hard to navigate. It is crucial to build a clean and engaging UX for a voice skill as users cannot navigate easily with toolbars and visually see the application structure.