Inspiration
The Golden MacGuffin was born out out of a love for all things science fiction, fantasy, and adventure that I read as a child. The wonder and magic I experienced is something that I would love to give back to kids (and possibly all audiences) through this project.
What it does
The skill allows the intrepid adventurer following along with TeyShawn to choose what adventures will take place depending on the choices that they make. There are 96 nodes or scenes, and plenty of different surprise endings, as well as narrative loops.
How I built it
After deciding on a concept, I started my research on GitHub and discovered the Alexa interactive adventure game tool created by Amazon engineer Thomas Yuill and uploaded by Amazon engineer Robert Jamison. As someone who is new to the world of coding, this tool really gave me the impetus I needed to be intrepid and explore my creative abilities and coding skills.
Challenges I ran into
While the tool was tremendously helpful, I wound up having to break out of the node.js kit provided in order to customize the project to my own ends. Narrative looping was especially difficult for me. Figuring out how to re-use intents within nodes proved quite the challenge, but it was worth it!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- I'm quite proud of the storylines and overall narrative that was concocted as part of the creative process!
- Did I mention all of the JSON coding that I learned how to navigate?
What I learned
- This project truly pushed me to grow creatively, and also helped me gain new skill sets.
What's next for The Golden MacGuffin
I'm excited about continually adding more illustrations to all the scenes as soon as I can get some spare time in there somewhere! I'm looking forward to giving the audience the visuals of the narratives that have been bouncing around my head!
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