Stick it Together

Stick It Together

TLDR: A two-player party game for an Amazon Fire TV Stick where you race to link two unrelated words through a chain of spoken associations. Gemini validates and scores your chain with the aim of the game to link the 2 words in the least amount of words.

Inspiration

We started from Jackbox, a party game that revolves around using your own device to submit answers/play games,. That got us thinking about the Fire TV Stick as an unconventional platform to build for. And once we were thinking unconventionally, the game mechanic followed naturally: link two completely unrelated words through a chain of associations. The platform and the concept ended up being the same idea.

How it works

Two unrelated words appear on screen. A buzzer fires at a random time. Whoever grabs the remote first links the words out loud, step by step, into the Fire TV mic. Fewer steps is better. The second player always gets a turn but can see the first player's keywords however, reusing one costs double. Miss the timer or having an invalid chain gives a +10 penalty.

How we built it

React/TypeScript frontend served from a Vultr VM, with a FastAPI backend handling game state, scoring, and AI calls
A Kotlin app on the Fire TV loads the frontend and bridges the gameplay, with a fair amount of work under the hood to keep everything responsive on the hardware and cater it more to the firestick.
Gemini validates each word chain, extracts the keywords, and scores it. It also does live TTS using Elevenlabs commentary that reacts to what's happening in the game

Biggest challenge

The Fire TV we had is an older model (1080p 3rd Gen) with 1GB of RAM. We spent hours cutting animations and effects as well as trying to optimise the firestick side just to keep it playable.