Picture Guesser for the Echo Show

The tile removing, picture guessing game for the Echo Show.

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Inspiration

Casual games for mobile devices are fun and popular. Amazon Alexa should let you play casual games too. A tile removal game for the Echo Show and Echo Spot is a great way for kids to develop persistence and reasoning skills.

What it does

The player is presented with multiple albums and each album contains multiple picture puzzles covered in numbered tiles. Speak to remove tiles until enough of the picture is revealed to guess. Guess correctly to win coins or lose coins for a wrong guess. Solve a puzzle to unlock another puzzle in the album. Great for kids 8+.

How I built it

This game was build using JavaScript and the Alexa Skills Kit for Node.js and the ASK CLI. The skill is hosted in AWS Lambda and uses S3 buckets to store audio and images and uses DynamoDB to persist player game info across sessions.

Challenges I ran into

Developing for the Echo Show/Spot is limited to a few display templates.To get the tile removing to work, I used SVG converted to an image. Also, the photos needed to be large enough to see on the Echo Spot.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The design of the voice user interface and screens. The puzzle screen with tile overlays.

What I learned

The default tap "Go Back" interaction for the Echo Show will go through every change in the puzzle screen. For this reason, I chose to use a voice command to go back to the album screen.

What's next for Picture Guesser

Create more puzzle albums with different themes. Investigate the possibility of allowing players to purchase special albums. Add users to a weekly high score list.

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