Solar System Chase board game

Discover and learn together in this Solar System exploration trivia team-based game. Explore the solar system, learn new facts. Compete and collaborate with family and friends.

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Inspiration

Voice user interfaces offer new game play and interaction modes. This projects explores using Amazon Alexa as a game master to create a virtual board game for teams of 2-4 players with a space theme to learn about planets, moons and solar system. Offer competitive and collaborative game play with a high level of replayability and interesting, strategic and engaging choices for players and teams. The main purpose of the game is to explore our solar system and become familiar with the planets and associated moons and their features e.g., relative size, placement, location, orbits, composition and timeline for discovery. From this, players will be able to recognize planets and moons by their unique characteristics and understand the origin and meanings of their names. The game is designed for competing two teams with a collaborative element to gameplay. The design of the game mechanics allows interesting decisions and choices to be made at different stages of the game facilitating strategic thinking and planning. It should be an engaging and competitive and collaborate family and friends-based experience

What it does

Solar System Chase board game is an Alexa skill which combines a virtual board game with a voice driven, virtual assistant to create an engaging team based, educational game where you explore the Solar System with your friends, learning fascinating facts about the planets and their moons. The game is educational in nature. Amazon Alexa acts as the quizmaster and guide for two opposing teams (Astronauts versus the Cosmonauts) as they compete in a race to the end, dice driven, space trivia game where players answer different question types and collect points while encountering and avoiding space hazards, meteor showers, solar storms and a black hole in an attempt to make it home to Earth safely. The game maintains and stores game state, scores and data and can be paused and resumed and has a large bank of different question types for game replayability. The players race around the solar system answering a range of different question types to try to get back to Earth first. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins. The average game session is 20 minutes+. The skill offers 2 modes, question of the day and full game mode.

How we built it

The skill is multimodal. A fully custom game board was designed to facilitate team based competitive and collaborative gameplay. The game/skill has dynamic content and can maintain game state and supports pausing and resuming the game. It uses a range of AWS Services including the Alexa Skill kit, S3, lambda and DynamoDB

Challenges we ran into

Using a conversational, voice driven, virtual assistant as a quizmaster in a board game where the virtual assistant manages opposing teams of players and guides the teams through the entire game from start to finish i.e., asks questions, keep scores, provides guidance and timely feedback when required while maintaining and managing game state(s). The design and optimization of game mechanics and the conversation flow to keep the game fluid and engaging while trying to avoid repetition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created a full game with 2 modes was created with question of the day and full game modes. The teams can play a full game with the Alexa managing the opposing teams of players and guiding the teams through the entire game from start to finish i.e., asks questions, keep scores, provides guidance and timely feedback when required while maintaining and managing game state(s). Fluid conversation design to try and keep the game pace engaging while trying to avoid repetition.

What we learned

How to design a team based competitive and collaborate virtual board game with a user interface which manages and stores game state using a conversational voice user interface.

What's next for Solar System Chase board game for Amazon Alexa

The immediate plans are to extend the question database, explore new game modes, improve the front end with better animation(s). Explore the design of a physical board game.

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