Doppio Games The 3% Challenge Interview

November 20, 2019 at 3:54am
By Jason Stettner

Interview with Jeferson Valadares, co-founder and CEO at Doppio Games

A staple I do in all interviews in order to start things off is to ask that you elaborate a bit about your game(s) that people might not know?

Jeferson: Doppio Games focuses on the power of voice as an interface and is changing the landscape of gaming using AI technology, currently interfacing with smart speakers like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, with a future for additional platforms.

Our latest title, The 3% Challenge is available on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with the latter including enhanced graphics (with Interactive Canvas); Doppio is one of the first globally to ship with this new tech. The Vortex, our debut title, has received thousands of positive reviews since its launch about a year ago.

There’s a partnership with Netflix with regards to The 3% Challenge, how did that come to be and what elements of the original series were you able to use for this experience?

Jeferson: Fans of the sci-fi thriller called “3%,” a Netflix original series, can join the process where candidates are challenged and vetted, just like in the show. The Netflix series is set in a world sharply divided between progress and devastation, where people are given a chance to make it to the “better side,” but only three percent of the candidates succeed. We met Bianca Comparato, the lead actress in the show, and we started discussing how cool it would be to turn the series into a game, and we made it happen!

Voice control is a technology that’s becoming more popular with many home speakers and regular devices integrating voice assistants. What’s the process like to bring a sense of gaming by just using your voice and do you see more devices supporting this type of experience in the future?

Jeferson: It’s a quite exciting space creatively since there are very few titles in gaming history that used voice and conversation as the main form of control. So, we are working to push the boundaries of game design, knowing voice control could evolve to outpace touch control and other traditional interfaces, such as typing. We believe conversations are the most natural use of voice, so conversational games present a potentially significant opportunity for video game businesses.

While perhaps obvious, could you go over the difference in designing a game that just purely relies on voice as opposed to the traditional controller, or screen that many are used to?

Jeferson: The very first thing you need to think about is, how do you even design a game for a player that might not have a screen at all? With that in mind, we’ve been very purposeful with the information we provide.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that in natural language there are many different ways to say the same thing, and we need to be able to handle all of them. But the major paradigm shift is that it puts the onus on the developer (in a normal game we teach people what commands they should use, but in a voice game the player says what they want and it’s up to us to deliver on that).

For example, our games have little or no tutorial because we basically put players in situations, ask what they want to do, and then try to figure out how to move forward based on what they say. It’s a lot more work for us, but when it works, it honestly feels like magic!

What sort of new gaming experiences do you feel a voice focused setup could provide?

Jeferson: Voice isgreat for conversations, so for example any gameplay that involves interactions with other characters would fall into a natural space. One of the most common uses today is for things answering questions in game genres such as trivia and quizzes, but you can extend this to negotiations, interrogations, squad coordination, etc. This also works well complementing traditional things, such as controllers.

For example, you could play a rally racing game where you drive a car and use voice to interact with a navigator, or you could control one of the players in FIFA while yelling for another player to cross the ball to you so you can score. Also, there’s a strange emotional commitment when you say something out loud, versus when you type it or move a stick on a joypad…it just feels different.

The Xbox One Kinect had some elements of voice input; do you feel that people are more into that type of controlling now? Was that device’s voice options not quite as matured in comparison to the technology in Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.?

Jeferson: Players are way more likely to enjoy something if it actually works. For voice recognition, the threshold is quite high – 95% success. If it’s less than that, the experience becomes frustrating. There are two aspects ofsmart speakers that improve on what the Kinect did. First, one of the unsung aspects of smart speakers today is the quality of the hardware design.

For example, they have multiple microphones designed to capture audio from a living room, which is a big improvement over what Kinect did. So, they just listen better. Second, smart speakers also provide high-quality natural language processing software that takes that problem away from the developer. So, understanding is also better.

Where do you see voice-controlled technology going in the future, in terms of being utilized for gaming?

Jeferson: We see the future being multimodal; more than one interface being used at the same time. As voice control becomes more ubiquitous, it will become a part of most gaming experiences. As users seek ways to get the most from their mobile devices, they listen to more audio content, making mobile conversational gaming a natural next extension of their entertainment pursuits.

There’s a lot of customization elements present with these controllers; how did the team decide that this open level of freedom was the way to go?

Jeferson: We want gamers to have a fun experience creating their own controller, while also making it one-of-a-kind product. Being that each controller is hand-made, we feel a large variety of options are necessary to make you stand out from the rest.

Lastly, I would like to leave a spot for you to say something or go over anything I might have missed during the interview?

Jeferson: We are very excited to explore new types of interactions in the service of fun. With AI changing the landscape of gaming, we are striving to revolutionize the gaming industry with captivating, commercially successful gaming experiences that can’t be achieved on any other platform.

We are trying to pushthe boundaries of game design, knowing voice control will become more and more a part of our daily lives. Conversational games present a potentially significant opportunity for video game businesses as voice is the most natural way to immerse a player in a character driven story.

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