Getting better on time. One day this week lost to illness. COVID-19 intensifies out there, and I’m tremendously grateful for this project that can happily tick along in almost complete isolation. I don’t take that for granted in the least. I spent this week doing a deep dive on Alexa Skill Flow Builder.

This post is a short introduction to what it is, along with a summary of my experiences with it. This is where I spent the majority of the week.

I’ve created a prototype Skill Flow Builder skill implementing some of Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The code is accessible here (On a side note, Warlock of Firetop Mountain was reinvigorated a while back by Tin Man Games and given some real strategy chops. You can check it out here on Steam)

I read through MDA : A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research by Robin Hunicke, Marc Gateau Leblanc, Robert Zubek this week. Some summary notes (from an admittedly 6 page document) are available here.

I’ve now completed the consultation around the conversational model. Unedited notes are up here. Looking forward to putting some of that into practice hopefully in week 3.

I’d planned to put together some practices around error handling as part of this week, but it turns out that error handling isn’t really a facet of developing with Skill Flow Builder. So this may become part of week 3’s activities.

Due to its focus on a specific kind of game experience that precludes Alexa Skills, I parted ways with Game Feel about a third of the way through the book, but found the first section of it very valuable. Notes from that reading are available here