This week was a very full week, and it feels like a productive one. I don’t take lightly at all the fact that I’m able to continue beavering away on this project, and follow my curiosity to its conclusion on threads of inquiry. I’m incredibly fortunate.

I spent this week looking at creating experiences like the classic LucasArts or Sierra Games point and click adventures, like Secret of Monkey Island or King’s Quest. I’d intended to look at the feeling of repeated audio assets and ways to mitigate the feeling of repeated audio assets and ways to mitigate the feeling of staleness that could creep in, but I ended up going down two other rabbit holes, both of which are sort of a continuation of week one’s work looking at velocity, and going to bear fruit down the track. They were:

• slightly overbuilding a prototype ‘audio adventure’
• digging further into automated testing with Alexa

Slightly Overbuilding the Prototype

The code for the prototype is over here on Bitbucket Rather than creating a mocked up sequence of events, I used python-statemachine to put together a basic implementation of a one room experience. There are a number of objects in the room, and a number of supported verbs. It’s only partially implemented in the sense that not all verbs have been plugged in, but the experience towards the end of the week was that adding new functionality was much quicker, thanks to…

Automated Testing in Alexa

I had tagged investigating both lambda-local and the ask simulate and ask dialog capabilities as a leave-over from week one. I fell down this rabbit hole because of the time I was spending in each cycle of testing - code, deploy, open Alexa Simulator and test. First of all, Alexa Simulator is a sluggish experience when you want code fixed five minutes ago. This investment in time made (and will make) a huge difference, because testing using lambda-local can be done with no server-side interaction, shortening that loop dramatically.

There are a few things I need to follow up, but once that’s done I’ll be putting up a more generalised post on automated testing for Python in Alexa.

A few other notes:

• this post helped me create my first Lambda layer. I was previously missing the python parent directory in the zip file. There’s likely some Lambda documentation that lays this out more clearly - I’ll be hunting this down in the meantime.
• Planned audio consulting for this week was postponed due to scheduling conflicts. This will occur at the end of March if rescheduling goes to plan.
• I’ve put up a list of outstanding items to investigate here. Expect that to go up rather than down.
• With a combination of using layers and similar zipping, I’ve now got a nice lean deploy script example.
• The point and click adventure from this week is going to be the likely basis of experiments in sound mixing for FX down the line.

What’s Next?

I’ll be wrapping up reading through Game Sound tomorrow morning. This week coming I’m looking forward to some awesome primer consulting on complex rules systems, and reading Jesse Schell’s Art of Game Design.

I’m going to implement static & varied audio for the graphic adventure for comparison, and will be putting together a blog post and video to show the contrast between the two.

Can’t wait!