Nerfgun Battle for Alexa

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  Our super fun testing hardware.

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  Our tech stack

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  May the odds be ever in your favor...

Have you ever played a game with your friends and at some point, one of you asked what the score was and it suddenly hits you that no one was actually keeping track of it ? Well worry no more. We present to you the first virtual, voice interactive referee.

Our project uses Amazon Alexa to start a Nerfgun game, add the players, create the teams, keep track of the health of each player, reduce it each time they get hit and when it reaches zero, it lets everyone know that that player is out of the game. It also sends the teams a message with a keyword.

We had a lot of fun while bringing this project to life, but also many challenges crossed our path, since implementing skills in Alexa was new to all of us. Many were the times when we tried our code with Alexa, failed to make it work, had to go back to it, review it, improve it and try it out again and again. However this did not discourage us. All the contrary, this made us work even harder in order to make it work on time.

With a little bit of effort, this project can not only be used with nerfgun games, but all types of multiplayer, score-keeping games (such may be Volleyball, Basketball, Chess etc.).

Technical Overview:

The entire functionality is implemented in one single Alexa skill. Our backend is in AWS with an AWS Lambda functions triggered by Alexa and DynamoDB for persistence during a game session.

A more advanced game mode is utilizing the Twilio API to communicate with individual players when Alexa cannot say out a secret loud.

Summary about Nerfgun Battle for Alexa:

-Starts a game -Adds the players -Assigns players to teams -Gives feedback whenever players claim they were hit -Reduces the health of the player who was hit -When health reaches 0, it announces that the player is out -Once all the players in a team are out, it announces the winner -Restarts a new game if asked