Playing Melee is often full of key-smashing. Each character has special skills that should be taken advantage of. But its easy to forget all the differences between the 26 different characters. So we wanted to create a hands free app to accompany your playtime to bring some order to the chaos.
Before you start your game, turn on your application and select your characters. Just shout out the selection you made and it will tell you aloud one of the best combo moves to use on that character. Even if you forget later on in the match, don't worry! Just call out the name of your character and it will remind you all that precious info again to crush your opponents.
This application was developed for Android using Android Studio. We used the native voice to text API for Android to recognize when someone calls for help on a character by name. We randomized the smash commands that would be given each time so that they would change each time. Then, we used text to voice to read out each command.
One of the challenges we ran into was the inability for the native voice to text software to constantly listen for the duration of a game while also storing the information recorded. However, we were able to add this funcitonality.
Most of us had never worked on Android development before. This was also developed at HackUTA. This was also the first time many of us had competed in a hackathon. We learned, not only better design for applications, but ways to use time more effectively and work better in a team. Version control through complicated errors was something we pushed through constantly. This challenged even the most experienced of us in this project.
Next steps could include making Melee Me cross platform for all of those Apple Smashers! But we would also like to create more sophisticated and specialized sound recognition capabilities to make the app also respond to the game's character selection noises and not just the players voice. However, next, we are all most likely just going to be playing Melee. Happy gaming!