Meridian

Inspiration

We were really inspired by older adventure games Myst, Zork, and Space Ace. The way that they build immersive worlds through a lot of descriptive language or puzzles that are informed by the environment in which they're implemented really appealed to us. We also took inspiration from the, initially thought of as a joke, Skyrim for Alexa, but we took it in a serious direction and tried to use that medium to make the content more accessible.

What it does

This google assistant application uses conversational interface to lead the player through a text/audio based adventure game. In the game, the player is plagued by an incessant voice in their head and has far more questions than answers about what they're doing there or who they are. The player navigates their way across a few areas of the island and encounters some of the creatures already inhabiting the island in search of answers.

How we built it

We initially wrote the story, story boarding it out with sticky notes, then eventually moving it into a google doc for more thorough scripting. From there we made a transferrable version of the app in BotSociety. This allowed us to understand the flow of the choices in the game a little better and also to make it easier for us to port the general structure of the program into dialogFlow. We then used google cloud services' language processing ML to train the agent as well as using GCS to host portions of the application. We then spent most of the time rearranging the paths of the game and ensuring that the contexts we set led the player through the scenes in a logical and well-paced manner.

Challenges we ran into

We initially had a much bigger design for the game, including the collection of three items which could be collected to unlock more back story for the main character as well as their connection with the island the game is set on. We wanted to make sure we had a polished project to show, so we ended up paring it down to a demo version of the game in which the first artifact is only revealed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the world we were able to build in such a short time, most of the story was written in the first 10 hours of the event and we're really pleased with the interesting elements and environments we created using only spoken word.

What's next for Meridian

We'd really love to have a full version of the game in which the player can uncover more of the story that we wrote through exploration and discovering the three artifacts they're supposed to. Additionally, we'd like to have sound affects, multiple voices for the different characters, as well as different accessibility settings for text-only, limited mobility, and multilingual interactions.

Built With

• bot-society
• dialog-flow
• google-cloud
• ssml