PinnedCreating an Alexa Game: From Idea to Code and BeyondA Multipart Series about Number Spies; a voice-first game for Amazon Alexa — History In the Fall of 2019, I officially started the journey of creating Number Spies for Amazon Alexa. The idea for the game started at least a year earlier, but I finally had the skills needed for the core functionality. I spent hundreds of hours over many months writing code and…Amazon Alexa3 min readAmazon Alexa3 min read
Nov 27, 2020Creating an Alexa Game: Number Spies — Alexa Flash BriefingBuilding an audio file and feed JSON with AWS Step Functions and Lambda Layers. Overview When a user says “Alexa, what’s my Flash Briefing” then all briefings in their playlist will play in the order they specify. This can be configured in the Alexa App. For Number Spies, the Number…Amazon Alexa8 min readAmazon Alexa8 min read
Nov 11, 2020Creating an Alexa Game: Content Management with Sanity.ioA Headless CMS for you Game Content Overview The best way to modify your game content is to put it into a Content Management System (CMS). That way changes to the content can happen without the need to recompile the content in code. …Amazon Alexa5 min readAmazon Alexa5 min read
Nov 7, 2020Creating an Alexa Game: Number Spies — System Components OverviewArchitecture and Services to Support the Game Overview In the previous article, we talked about how Number Spies started with making an Alexa Flash Briefing to duplicate the behavior of a numbers station. That idea grew into a voice game in the form of an Alexa Skill. In order to create…Amazon Alexa7 min readAmazon Alexa7 min read
Nov 3, 2020Creating an Alexa Game: The Spark of Inspiration for Number SpiesA game about spies, coded messages, and numbers stations. Introduction When creating a game, there are many things to consider. How many players? Is the game genre adventure, RPG, puzzle game, or one of many other choices? What is the theme? …Amazon Alexa5 min readAmazon Alexa5 min read