Voice first games are one of the most popular Amazon Alexa skill categories. So what type of voice games are available? And how do you create them? We speak to game developer and reviewer, Florian Hollandt, to find out.

Games are helping Alexa take off. According to Voicebot.ai, Alexa Skill games are the second most popular skill categorybehind smart home skills. Amazon has been encouraging the development of games, too. We've seen the Alexa Skills Challenge: Kids recently and I'd say it’s more than likely that most of the developer rewards will have gone to game developers, given the engaging nature of games.

We’ve touched upon voice first games on the podcast previously, such as our chat with Jo Jaquinta of Tsa Tsa Tzu, but we haven’t yet covered audio game development in detail, which is what we’ll do today.

Creating voice first games

In this episode, we’ll be getting into detail about the different kids of voice first games that are out there, as well as looking at some of the techniques you can use to create engaging games such as interactive stories.

We’ll cover things like:

• Naming a game and how a name can reduce discoverability
• The challenge of providing content
• The one game per month challenge
• The types of games that are available on Amazon Alexa
• Game design techniques
• Interactive story game development techniques
• Fake decisions - what are they and how can you use them to enhance engagement

Our Guest

Florian Hollandt is the Product Manager at Jovo, the cross platform voice app platform, and is also an Alexa game developer and reviewer. He’s created some popular games on Alexa, such as the German card game, Mau Mau, and has written a ton of voice first game reviews on Medium.

Florian is madly passionate about voice first games and his knowledge on the subject is impressive. He guides us through his experience and shares some delightful tips on how you can start creating voice first games yourself.

Links

• Follow Florian on Twitter
• Check out Florian's voice first game reviews on Medium

Some of the things Florian spoke about:

• Voice first game design tutorial from Amazon
• The Mitsuku chat bot
• Woebot
• One game per month website
• Select a story
• Magic door
• Mr Robot

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