News - 2016080801 - Amazon makes it easier to build audio adventure games for the Echo
If you grew up in the early age of computing, you likely encountered text-based adventure games. That ancient form of gaming got a new lease on life thanks to the Amazon Echo -- you can play some audio-based adventure games (including a Batman one) in which you talk to the Echo to move forward in the narrative. Amazon is now making it easier for developers to build more interactive audio games by releasing a tool that lets you graphically design audio adventures for the Echo.
The tool provides a graphical interface to let you map out the various decision trees and narratives that you'll need in making such a game work with the Echo; it also contains a handful of templates to make it easier to get started. Those templates work for trivia games or ones with a decision tree, and you should be able to just plug in questions and edit the sample to get a simple game going without much fuss.
Amazon's blog post has plenty of more in-depth detail for interested developers. While these types of games are probably never going to be a major use case for Echo, Amazon has clearly shown over the last year or so that it wants to add a huge variety of features to capture the attention of buyers -- this one might do the trick if you want to distract your kids for a few minutes here and there.
