Mars Adventure: Colony Beta

An interactive story where you are a landing on mars to find that the colony you are visiting is empty. Use your voice and imagination to find out where everybody is and what had happend.

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Inspiration

I like playing puzzle games and I like reading science fiction. So I combined both of the things into an interactive science fiction story with a lot of puzzles in it. Using voice as user interface is a challenging situation and I want to master the VUX. I think we will have even more voice controll in the future.

How I built it

I used the Alexa Skill Flow Builder Engine and wrote the code and story using VS-Code. The program is hosted on AWS Lambda and utilizes DynamoDB for persistence. Sourcecode and story text is managed with git version controll and is deployed using a CI/CD Pipeline on bitbucket.org

Challenges I ran into

Alexa Skill Flow Builder is still in development and it is not a full featured system yet. During the time of the project there were two releases of the engine and I needed to update my CI system. Polly Voices sometimes pronounce words strangely. This was fixed by writing a plugin for Alexa-SFB now only some words are still pronounced strangely. AWS was new to me and I had to learn a lot about serverless systems. I never did video editing but I managed to make a 5 minute video for this project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I learnd how to build and automatically deploy cloud applications on AWS. Duing writting of the story I significantly improved typing speed using 10-finger system

What I learned

I learned JavaScript for node.js I learned Bitbucket Pipelines / Docker container

What's next for Mars colony Beta

The story still needs some more chapters to be written out. And maybe a translation into english.

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