Monster Hunter is an interactive Alexa game that contains fairytale creatures, goblins, witches, bears and more. The medieval vibe is evident as soon as you hear the gates of the village being lowered in the opening scene of the game.
I wanted to build a voice-controlled game that would consume the imagination of the player and allow them to decide their own fate. This was the first time I had built an Alexa game with this sort of VUI (Voice User Interface) that would give the user/player this much freedom.
It's fair to say that this was the most time-consuming Alexa Skill I have ever built and this was mainly due to the number of different paths that player could choose, each path altering the story of the game in a different way. For each "Path" I would have to write custom scripts and add audio files which included custom sound effects and music to complement that specific scene in the game. Sometimes the environment was spooky, sometimes mystical and sometimes fight or flight, and make no mistake about it... there are many ways to die in this game.
Implementing ISP (In Skill Purchasing)
Monetization was one personal goal for me while developing this game, after I had fun unleashing my creative story writing into this game, I then decided to add a purchasable hint pack that -
"gives you unlimited hints and inside contextual information about each scene in the game. It helps you uncover things you may not know about, enrich the game experience and help you make better decisions to stay alive for longer"
Free promotion from amazon? I'll take that.
Soon after publishing this game, the amazon Alexa games team got in contact with me and decided that they wanted to promote my game! this involved them getting a designer to create a custom banner for this skill which they would promote on amazon.com.
Summary
Overall, this game was incredibly rewarding to design and develop, one improvement that I would implement next time would be completely designing each path of the VUI separately before even beginning implementation. Because this was a side project I had the freedom to experiment and do whatever I wanted. It defiantly made me realise the importance of planning the design for the happy, neutral and negative paths of the VUI in advance.
Feel free to check the game out here
Search for "Monster Hunter" by RP apps In the Alexa store or you can say "Alexa, enable Monster Hunter"
Happy Hunting.