MARY CHEN: Welcome to season 5 of Assistant on Air.
LEON NICHOLLS: It looks a little different since we're at home,
but we've got some great content coming your way.
MARY CHEN: In this season, we're chatting
with developers and designers who
collaborated with us on a couple of really cool new games
for smart displays.
LEON NICHOLLS: And in this episode,
we're going to share an overview of the recent initiative,
and explore the creative thinking behind why
we love the ideas for games on smart displays.
MARY CHEN: So let's get started.
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I'm Mary, and I'm a Strategy Lead for the Google Assistant.
LEON NICHOLLS: And I'm Leon, a Developer Relations Engineer
for the Google Assistant.
Now, together we launched a project
to create several games for smart displays.
One of our goals was to use some of the latest
tech in these games, but also to determine the best practices
for both game designers and game developers
to be successful on our platform.
MARY CHEN: We learned a lot over the last couple months,
so starting today and in the weeks to come,
we'll be publishing these tips and resources in various forms.
You'll have full sample code to all
of the games we're talking about,
case studies, best practices, and of course,
the conversations from this season.
So while we worked on this project for a couple of months,
Leon has been involved in the smart display ecosystem
for quite some time now.
Leon, as an expert in the space, can you talk about how you got
started, what do you like about this nascent technology,
and what's still being figured out.
LEON NICHOLLS: Yeah, I got involved in the Google
Assistant long before we even had a public SDK.
And I remember trying out some of the early experiences,
and it was very inspirational, and it
seemed like a great opportunity for developers.
I grew up on "Star Trek," and to see
how the tech has evolved to be able to do something similar
is really great to see.
Some of the early actions I worked on
were for trivia games, which were ideal for audio devices.
But we also learned that some of the robust [? intent ?]
handling was a bit challenging.
Once we launched smart displays, that
seemed like a great opportunity to explore
the use of voice and visuals in new kinds of gaming
experiences.
Now, we knew that leveraging voice for games was inevitable,
and we had the opportunity to be one of the first
to look at the challenges and experiences behind it.
And we decided early on in the design of the games
to really focus on the user needs.
Mary, can you talk about that a bit?
MARY CHEN: Yeah, so before we thought
about what kind of games to build,
we took a step back to really lock down
the types of gaming experiences that
would complement this type of device,
and the location in the home.
We used a framework, a product management framework,
called Jobs to be Done, which asks the question,
what value is your product or experience providing to whom?
And in our case here, basically we're
asking, what is the person who's playing this game,
really trying to accomplish here?
So we came up with a lot of different use cases,
and we locked down three target gaming experiences that really
fit the need of this type of game in the home,
and the project management framework.
So these are the three target experiences.
So the device is in the living room a lot of times,
and a lot of times we see that we just need
a couple of minutes or a couple of hours
to relax, to destress, to not care
about the worries of the day.
So we want to build a game that really
fits that mood, a type of ambient
experience to give you a Zenful type of environment.
On the flip side, if you're hosting a party in your living
room, well, sometime in the future,
if you're hosting a games night in your living room,
then we want to make sure that you
can have a fun time with the Google Assistant,
and if it could be a facilitator for that type of games.
So finally, we also see that smart displays are often
in the kitchen.
So we wanted to have an opportunity for the young ones
in the house, the kids in the house,
to be able to do some cooking on the device
while the parent's cooking, or some kind of fun, educational,
and interactive opportunity there.
So these are our three target gaming experiences,
and the games that we built afterwards
really fit that use case.
So we felt pretty good about these gaming use cases
and the types of environments that people
will be enjoying them at home.
At the same time, we knew that we were just getting started,
because using voice as a primary mode of gameplay
is still relatively new.
Now speaking about voice, Leon, can you
talk about the differences about building with voice
first in mind, versus building games on other platforms?
LEON NICHOLLS: Sure, I think one important aspect
is to not treat the user like a physical input
device, like a keyboard or game controller,
but to make sure that the user interaction is conversation.
Now, even for games that rely on touch,
voice can be a fast and quick way
to do various tasks in the game that isn't supported
by any other platform.
But you realize, we're still very
early in the stage of trying to determine what kind of gameplay
is the best for voice platforms.
Luckily, we collaborated with a bunch of people
with a lot of experience in creating games,
and we were very interested in exploring
some of the creative opportunities for a new gaming
platform.
So Mary, can you talk about who we worked with on the games,
and what were the games we created?
MARY CHEN: Sure, we collaborated with two creative technology
agencies, B-Reel and MediaMonks, and we spent a lot of time
with them getting the games right and the game
mechanics right.
Once we did that, we came up with four games that
matched the target use cases I talked about earlier.
First game is Gnome Garden, this is your ambient experience,
where you're sculpting a beautiful garden
with your voice.
The second game is Mime Jam.
This is a reverse charades party game, and it's a lot of fun,
too.
Our last two games are aimed at kids, with Cookie Detective
being a modern take of 21 Questions, where you're trying
locate this cookie in the kitchen.
And the last game is called Junior Chef,
and you're a chef in a busy kitchen,
and you're cooking up international cuisines
for all these cute monster guests.
Now with those in mind, like Leon
mentioned in the beginning of the episode,
we also wanted to use our new technologies
to build out these games.
Leon, can you share the tools and features
that went into the development?
LEON NICHOLLS: So, the agencies we collaborated
with got early access to some of our latest tooling,
including Actions Builder, and the Actions SDK.
Actions Builder is a web-based IDE,
and Actions SDK is a file-based solution, combined
with a command line interface, that
allows developers to keep using their favorite IDE
and their existing development processes.
And one of the agencies also got early access
to a new feature called Continuous Match Mode.
Now, this allows developers to create games
where the user can say a series of words that
are then matched in real time.
This is great for word games.
And stay tuned, we have got an upcoming episode
where we explain how Continuous Match Mode was
used in one of the new games.
MARY CHEN: All right, so we hope you
enjoyed this introduction to our game development journey.
In the rest of the series, you'll
hear directly from the designers and developers
who built these games.
They'll be sharing their lessons learned, and lots
of great insights you don't want to miss.
So make sure you subscribe, and we'll see you soon.
LEON NICHOLLS: And that's a wrap on today's episode.
If you want to try the games, take a look at the links below.
Thanks for watching.
MARY CHEN: Bye.
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