Week 2: Research

This week, the team did research on a list of voice experiences available on Alexa and Google Home. We presented these discoveries to our client on Wednesday.

Here is a list of games that we have researched: 

• Disney Hits Challenge
• Volley FM
• Song Quiz
• The Magic Door
• Escape the Room
• Would You Rather for Family (Harry Potter Edition)
• Skyrim
• Mystery Animal
• Pillow Talk
• Microsoft XiaoIce
• Ding-Dong Coconut
• The Game of Castle
• 6 Swords

To see the research summary you can view in Google Doc through this link.

While we were sharing our research result with the Sims Alexa team, the team also share ideas prompted by our discoveries and lessons they learned from past experience. Here are some of the feedback we received. 

• Keep the humor. There’s a lot of use of humor in the Sims and the narrative is funny.
  
• Inspired by Mystery Animal, maybe the player can ask 20 questions about personalities and guess which Sims character it is.
  
• Inspired by Microsoft XiaoIce and Pillow Talk, maybe the team can translate screaming or words into Sims language.
  
• Keep the idea of community sharing and creative tool. Sims is a creative tool. Pieces can be mixed and matched. Instead of creating everything for the player, the game gives players the flexibility to create their own sims, houses or the world. The project should keep this idea.
  
• Avoid open-ended experience. The voice technology is not mature enough to do open ended experience well and it might confuse the player.
  
• If the team need sound effects and voice played together, one way to work around that is to combine the voice and sound effect into one single audio file.
  
• Don’t forget that we can use Alexa on Windows 10 and on the phone. Sometimes people don’t have Alexa at home. They can still play the Skill on their phone or computer. 

Experiments with Amazon Blueprints

On the tech side, developers made 3quick prototypes using Amazon Blueprints to get more familiar with the environment. You can check these out from the links below.

• Random Sims
  
  • Random Sims is a tool that you can find a random challenge for yourself to do in the Sims 4.
    
• My Alien Story
  
  • My Alien Story is quick experiment created with the Sci-Fi Skill Blueprint
    
• Reverse Trivia
  
  • Reverse trivia is a unique experience where you switch your role with Alexa. Instead of Alexa doing things for you, you answer questions that Alexa asks. 
    

Branding

The team started to design branding materials including the logo and poster. For the logo, we started with a list of brainstorming and narrowed down to three ideas. The logos are mainly geometric shapes or just typography. The inspiration comes from Sims branding materials. Apart from the classic stone icon, Sims poster background uses a lot of solid color geometric shapes, and we want to keep the theme in our logo and poster. Inspired by Amazon branding where two text bubbles appear on a living room picture, the poster uses graphic illustration of living room and displays the text of our unique Amazon Skill command in text bubbles. 

Logo Drafts:

Next Week

Next week the team will continue the brainstorming session and present one sentence ideas to our client.