Head Games (Alexa Skill) has been released

Technical Development Development Systems
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Head Games is an Alexa Skill that serves as a voice interface to Z-games like those you can create using Inform 7. Simply enable the skill from your Alexa device by saying, “Alexa, open head games.”

The skill currently provides access to the following games from the IF Archive:

  • Lost Pig
  • Adventure
  • All roads
  • Change in the weather
  • Film at eleven
  • Zork one
  • Zork two

M goal is to make it possible to post your own games and have them accessible through the skill as well. More to come on that. First, I need users to sign up so I can afford to put more effort in the project.

Cheers,
Ken

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Very interesting. I started play with Adventure. It worked fairly well and accepted commands as expected. You mention signing up. Does using the skill count as signing up?

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Using the skill counts counts for number of users and a 5 star is great for ratings. There is a subscription option that allows you to save your game state (and more than one game at a time) for more than the 3 day limit for non-subscribers. Given the time it takes to play some games, the subscription is a great option and provides me with the capital to keep adding more games to the inventory. The game hints subscription provides access to hints for each game. It takes a while to set up the hints for any given game because the native hint engine for Z games throws errors when trying to access in a non-text based interpreter. So, either subscription will help the cause. One cool part of the game is if you use your mobile device to communicate with Alexa through the Alexa app, the activity stream displays a text transcript. So, you get a visual and a history of what you did. And,you can avoid having to type with the voice interface.

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As a teacher, if you are interested in allowing your students to create their own IF (which I highly recommend) and then use in the skill, please let me know. I am working on a way to have a dynamic library by linking to a google spreadsheet so that other stories can be accessed through the skill. This would introduce them to the concepts of Natural Language Processing and dialog flow.