With the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows, iOS, and Android, developers aren't short of platforms to make games for. And while all of these have a visual component with their graphics being a selling point, voice-based assistants like Amazon's Alexa don't enjoy that luxury. This, however, hasn't stopped eager creators such as the Mumbai-based Boltd from developing games on it. The has already developed four games — or skills as they're known on the platform — for Alexa. Gadgets 360 spoke to founder Vishal Golia to find out about the state of developing skills for Amazon Alexa.
Although, some Alexa-powered devices like Echo Show[1] and Echo Spot[2] ship with a screen, for most part, the interaction tends to be audio-only.
"There is visual representation on very few screens,” says Golia ."There are devices that are screen-enabled like the Echo Spot and the Echo Show or a TV with Fire Stick. At the same time, the proliferation of those devices, in terms of percentage is perhaps single digits compared to all the Echo or Alexa-enabled devices that are out there."
To Golia this presents an intriguing challenge — designing a game for no screens. The company first cut it teeth with a Game of Places. In this game, Alexa[3] would say the game of the place and users need to reply with the name of another place that starts with the last letter of the previous word. It's as basic as it can get and got Golia and once this game was out there, his team thinking about more innovative ideas.
"For us, the big question was 'how do we make it worth a user's time?'," he explains. "The most obvious genres are trivia and...