Doppio is now part of Fortis!

We’re delighted to announce that Doppio is now part of Fortis!

Throughout our journey at Doppio over the past three-plus years, we have had a blast inventing the next generation of games. It has been our mission to bring gaming to everyone, through voice, live streaming, the web, mobile, and video conferencing platforms, and we’re still extremely excited about doing just that. 

So today, we’re thrilled to announce that Doppio is joining the Fortis team. Fortis is an early but mighty organization, with a leadership team of game-industry veterans that aspires to make great games that bring people together, while redefining how game companies work. It was a natural next step for us to join forces given the alignment of our goals: we both are fierce believers in building a sense of belonging through our games and their communities, and in how we operate and treat each other. We’re looking forward to working with some of the industry’s coolest people, who have also designed and launched some of the best games in the world!

In the meantime, don’t worry - for now, all the games you know and love are staying live and being updated as needed. More news as it develops!

To all our investors, friends, and family who have supported us on this path, we can’t thank you enough. We’re looking forward to the future, and we can’t wait to share our next games with you. 

Thanks/Obrigado!

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Find out more about Fortis here!

Doppio at Alexa Live 2020

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

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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!

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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

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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!

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That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more news about all these updates in the coming weeks!

Doppio closes seed funding round

Yesterday, we announced the completion of our first funding round. We’ve raised €1 million from a group of investors that includes the Amazon Alexa Fund and the Google Assistant Investment Program, as well as leading gaming and tech investors Sisu Game Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList and BreakawayGrowth Fund, alongside Portuguese investors Portugal Ventures and Busy Angels. The round also included several leading angel investors in the gaming industry, such as Lasse Seppänen (Supercell), Alexis Bonte (Stillfront & Atomico) and David Helgason (Unity).

We are tremendously grateful to this group of investors for the confidence they’ve shown in us. We strongly believe that voice-first games have the potential to bring exciting and compelling entertainment experiences to whole new audiences, and this investment will help us continue to do that.

In fact, we’re already putting some of that money to work on a brand new game, which we talked about a bit on stage at the VOICE Summit in Newark, New Jersey yesterday. We’ll have a lot more details to share on that soon, so stay tuned!

And if you are interested in joining the revolution, please get in touch!

In the meantime, here are a few of the articles in the media yesterday covering our funding round:

• Gamasutra – “Doppio raises $1.1 million from Google and Amazon for voice-controlled games”

• PocketGamer.biz – “Doppio Games raises $1.1 million for voice-controlled games”

• Business Insider – “2 gaming veterans raised $1 million from Amazon and Google to make games you can only play by voice” (subscription required)

And here are a few from our own back yard, em Português:

• Dinheiro Vivo – “Amazon e Google investem em startup portuguesa Doppio”

• Observador – “Portuguesa Doppio fecha ronda de 1 milhão de euros. Amazon e Google entre os investidores”

• ECO – “Portuguesa Doppio fecha ronda de um milhão. Amazon entre os investidores”

Interview with Gamereactor in Barcelona

I was recently in Barcelona for GameLab, and I had the opportunity to talk a little bit about what we are doing with the GameReactor team!

PG Connects London 2019

On January 21st and 22nd we will be in London giving a high-level overview of Voice Games for the PG Connects audience. As we gear up for the conference, the PG.Biz team interviewed us to find out a bit more about what we've been up to! You can read the full interview here.

And if you're at the conference, please come say hi!

Welcome to Doppio

Hello, worlds!

Today is the culmination of a lot of work behind the scenes in the past few months. Through this time, we had support and help from lots of people - you were too kind, and too numerous to list here. To you, a heartfelt THANK YOU!

Doppio is part dream and part strategic bet: both of us love stories and games, and we feel that this is a great time to be making entertainment that can be played in a uniquely human way - with our voices.

We decided to set on this voyage of discovery from Lisbon, as we feel there's a renaissance going on in Portugal, and we wanted to ride (and contribute to!) this wave of excitement and positivity.

Although we have lofty goals, we're not quite sure where this journey is going to take us. But we're glad that you're here with us.

Let's change gaming forever.