Interactive Fiction Alexa Skill

A Z-Machine for Alexa.

See it in action

Usage

This skill has been deployed to Alexa Skill Store; just say "Alexa, enable Interactive Fiction". If you don't have an Alexa device, you can try the skill out on https://echosim.io/ but it does not support sessions, making it seriously harder to use than a real Echo.

The official page of the skill on Amazon.com.

Installation

(Pre-requisites: install Maven and Leiningen)

If you want to build it from scratch:

• Get, build and install ZAX into local Maven repository:

#!/bin/bash

pushd ~/tmp/
git clone https://github.com/mattkimmel/zax.git
cd zax
git checkout -f 3113c4a74140628cfd0209c4756057f129ae2215 # tested with this version

patch --ignore-whitespace build.gradle << EOF
32a33,37
> 
> java {
>     sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
>     targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
> }
\ No newline at end of file
EOF

rm -f zax.jar
./gradlew clean build

jar cvmf build/tmp/jar/MANIFEST.MF zax.jar -C build/classes/java/main/ com

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=zax.jar -DgroupId=github-mattkimmel -DartifactId=zax -Dversion=0.92-SNAPSHOT-5 -Dpackaging=jar
popd

• Clone this project and build an uberjar with Leiningen:

git clone https://github.com/lischenko/interactive-fiction-alexa-skill
cd interactive-fiction-alexa-skill/
lein uberjar

The resulting jar is ready to be uploaded to an AWS Lambda function.

• Set your Lambda function handler to ifas.ZLambdaFunction::handleLambda
• Create DynamoDB tables (using aws cli in this example):

#!/bin/bash

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name IfasStoryLinks --attribute-definitions AttributeName=name,AttributeType=S --key-schema AttributeName=name,KeyType=HASH --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=1,WriteCapacityUnits=1

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name IfasStoryDumps --attribute-definitions AttributeName=customerId,AttributeType=S AttributeName=url,AttributeType=S --key-schema AttributeName=customerId,KeyType=HASH AttributeName=url,KeyType=RANGE --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=1,WriteCapacityUnits=1

The IfasStoryLinks table contains mappings from story names to URLs (should be pre-configured), and IfasStoryDumps keeps track of user state and is managed by the skill.

License

Copyright © 2016–2019 Vitaly Lishchenko

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.