Amazon announced a slew of new and exciting features for the Alexa platform yesterday as part of Alexa Live, an all-online streaming developer conference. At Doppio, we’re really bullish about the future of the Alexa platform for games, and so we were thrilled to be a part of several of the event’s announcements.
Here’s a quick roundup on all things Doppio from the Alexa Live program!
The Web API for Games lets us take our games to the next level
The Web API for Games is an exciting leap forward for our ability to deliver voice-forward games that also have great visual experiences. It enables developers like us to build rich animations on the back of web-standard technologies; to provide more a more dynamic audio experience with background tracks, loops and effects; and to take greater control of the player’s experience by controlling how and when the device prompts for voice input.
Back in April, we updated The 3% Challenge with a refreshed visual experience built on top of this exciting new technology, and we think it was a great improvement. You can try it out now on any Echo Show or Fire TV Cube device.
However, that’s not the most exciting thing we’re doing with the Web API for Games…
We’re bringing PAC-MAN to Alexa!
Yeah, you heard that right! As Jeferson announced during the conference, we’re working on a new game that will bring a voice-controlled PAC-MAN experience to your Alexa devices!
We’re really excited about this new game and we can’t wait to share more about it with you soon. To be the first to hear more, you can sign up for our newsletter – you definitely won’t want to miss out on this one!
Using APL-A to upgrade the audio experience on The Vortex
APL-A is an exciting new platform feature that allows developers to do more advanced audio mixing in our skills’ audio experiences. All of this happens at runtime, meaning we don’t need to spend a lot of time in development tweaking every audio clip by hand. And, it’s done in a simple and straightforward way that doesn’t slow down the player’s experience with our games.
João Costa, our Sound Designer, spoke about our experience converting The Vortex’s audio content to APL-A. You can also try it out for yourself in the game right now!
Quick Links allow you to launch directly into our games from a link
The new Quick Links feature provides a way for you to launch directly into our games from a link on the web. As our Marketing Lead Carolina Rocha discussed during the conference, this provides a quick and easy way for you to try out new games on this exciting platform; now, instead of having to remember an invocation phrase, you can just click a link and send the skill directly to the device of your choice.
In fact, you may have already seen these links throughout this post! But if not, here’s one for The 3% Challenge and one for The Vortex – try them out now!
That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more news about all these updates in the coming weeks!