Klue is the first text-based game in Slack that makes use of smart chatbots to draw the players into an immersive story - right inside the messaging app. With Klue, we are pushing the limits of chatbots interactions!

You can see our landing page here: http://kluestudio.com/

Join the game on Slack directly: https://klueslack.herokuapp.com/

Or check out some of the gameplay: https://youtu.be/VWc6pHSKxys

Klue takes you through a modern mystery-solving quest. You play as a project manager in an AI company who just got sensitive data about its latest product stolen. You must interact with other employees to find out who sold the company secrets to the competition.

The game’s mechanics include private messaging to every employee (the chatbots) and a common channel generated for each player in which the bots discuss among them, revealing crucial clues to the player. Indeed, the game is developed in a way that enables you to uncover 8 clues by talking to the bots in a very specific way. Only when you have found 5 clues that you can win the game.

Once we saw that Slack was a hackathon category, we reflected on how to engineer the most innovative experience in Slack. While Slack is “Where work happens” we believe that an engaging game could have a massive impact on transforming onboarding and can help expand Slack user-base. Plus it’s a really fun 10-minute experience.

We have developed an extensive story-creation platform that can be used in numerous ways: from innovative marketing campaign to engaging onboarding and training systems.

The backend relies on the Django framework and includes a user-friendly story building interface. The story creators can define bots, interactions, choices and write the story logic directly through our interface. Then, using the Slack API, the bots come to life and interact with the user.

Long time best friends, we - Ghyslain, software engineer and Jérémy, novel writer - got to work together on a truly unique project, combining our hobbies.

We built a community around our game through the Hackathon Facebook group as we were progressing through November. Most of our friends played Klue, and even when they didn’t know about Slack they intuitively picked up the game mechanics and had a very positive and engaging experience. Most of them replayed the game several times to make sure they had found all the clues!

Thank you for reading and we hope to meet you in Klue very soon,

Ghyslain and Jérémy