Amazon offers new tools for developing interactive adventure games on Alexa

Who says Amazon Alexa is only for your smart home needs? Now, it’s for gamers, too. On Tuesday, the web giant released a little something special for its developers — the ability to create voice-based games on Alexa.

With this latest tool, you can “graphically design choose your own interactive adventure games for Alexa,” explained product manager Robert Jamison. “Interactive adventure games represent a new category of skill that allows customers to engage with stories using their voice. With these skills, you can showcase original content or build compelling companion experiences to existing books, movies and games.”

Amazon is particularly proud of a new Batman-themed game known as The Wayne Investigation skill, in which players become detectives, attempting to solve the mystery of the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. But don’t worry — if that doesn’t sound like your ideal adventure, you can create your own.

With an “easy to use front-end that allows developers to instantly deploy code for your story,” Amazon is letting developers’ imaginations run free when it comes to their gaming preferences. You can download the tool now as a Github project.

To get started, you can check out Amazon’s Trivia or Decision Tree skill templates, which provide further insights into how developers and nondevelopers alike can make game skills. The templates found here take advantage of AWS Lambda and the Alexa Skills Kit, and simultaneously provide “the business logic, use cases, error handling and help functions for your skill,” Amazon says. It’s really just a plug-and-play — just imagine your own tree-based concept or trivia game, input your questions, and make changes to the existing sample. Amazon calls it “a valuable way to quickly learn the end-to-end process for building and publishing an Alexa skill.”