Unofficial Boggle

Create as many words as you can in 3 minutes from a 4x4 grid of letters.

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Inspiration

A Boggle lover for years, I've often thought of creating this skill, but with no screen display, it would be a little cumbersome. When APL was introduced and with the announcement of this contest, it just seemed a no-brainer.

What it does

Similar to the classic game, this skill will scramble 16 letter cubes and arrange them in a 4x4 grid. The skill will then time you for 3 minutes while you and everyone else that is playing, writes down as many words as they can from that grid. Once the time is up, the skill will wait while you tally up your scores.

As an added bonus, for those that want to see all the valid words that can be made from that grid, a small one-time entitlement in-skill purchase will give you that capability. At the end of the game, you can ask for the word list and the grid will be redisplayed with a scroll view next to it displaying every valid word in alphabetical order. This allows for easier scoring and ideas on what kind of words to look for in the future.

Additionally, the last game is stored and can be recalled at any time. Finally, I called upon all of Alexa's "friends" to help host the game, so they all randomly take turns speaking as needed.

How I built it

Python Lambda, DynamoDB and the APL interface editor, which is a fantastic tool that Amazon provides.

Challenges I ran into

There are some things APL doesn't allow for yet. One such item is the skill stops when a user touches the screen. It would be nice to have this as something that can be overridden. I have a ScrollView to see all the words that can be made from a grid, and when the user scrolls, the skill stops. I took Cami Williams advice to just display some text stating the Alexa command that needs to be said when skill is stopped.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making the game board look good on every type of screen device.

What I learned

Requires a fair amount of work to add in-skill purchasing. I had originally completed the skill without this and thought it would be simple to add a premium content capability, but there's more to it than first meets the eye.

What's next for Unofficial Boggle

There are lots of upgrades to add in the future including: 1) Settings to allow users to change grid size from 4x4 to other sizes 2) Allow users to customize colors of board, different skins 3) Allow users to set different background music 4) and more such as scoring for multiple players, score ladder, speaking words, touch screen input. . .

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