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In June 2023, Michael and I attended a UKIE networking event in London. The talks were interesting and the free pizza and wine were a nice bonus, but the best thing was running into Elaine Dowman from Barclays with whom we had connected at the London Games Festival the previous year. We caught Elaine up on where we were at with the game and then all of a sudden she was offering us a slot presenting at EGX in October. We couldn’t believe our luck!

Everything shifted gears as we prepared for the presentation. Our new developer got to work squashing bugs, Lizzie began revamping our social media presence, and I updated a few aspects of the demo, made some presentation slides and wrote my speech. It was down to the wire getting everything ready. The new code wasn’t ready until the morning of the event and I had been in and out of sleep throughout the night checking on the progress. But we made it and were as prepared as we could have been.

Elaine had told us that it was possible we could be presenting to an audience of zero, but thankfully a decent number of people came to watch. My speech about the game and our plans for it went okay despite my nerves and lack of sleep, and we were able to get four lovely people up on stage to play the demo. In accordance with Sod’s Law, the demo bugged out half way through, so I ended up having to cut the presentation short. The cause was probably some kind of Wi-Fi connectivity error because Wi-Fi is notoriously poor at these kinds of big events and Quiz Quest is so reliant on it. Up until the bug reared its ugly head the four volunteers seemed to be having fun, which was great to see, but overall the whole experience left me feeling incredibly deflated. I designed Quiz Quest to be a collaborative, communal experience, but the event hall was so noisy that cooperation between the four volunteers was all but impossible because they simply couldn’t communicate with each other. As a result, they never got to see the newest feature that myself and the dev had been working on: a ‘Team Bonus’ notification for when everyone answers the same question correctly. But niggling and negativity aside, it was amazing for such a fledgling company to have had the opportunity to present what is really only a prototype on a stage at such a big event. Even if it hadn’t gone as smoothly as it could have done, it can still be chalked up as a win. Once again, I would like to express my thanks to Elaine and the team at Barclays for making all of it possible.

Lizzie and I spent the rest of EGX playing loads of games, which was great fun! Games that particularly stood out to me were Loddlenaut (a cute little cosy game where you float around an alien ocean cleaning up rubbish), Glass (a puzzle game based around constructing stained glass windows) and the various wooden games and puzzles from Imagination Gaming in the Tabletop Zone. (The Retro Zone was a welcome trip down Memory Lane as well!!)

So, nearly four years after coming up with the idea, we are really only at the start of our development journey. Our priority is completing the ‘Minimum Viable Product’ version of Quiz Quest. This version will progress through the four core levels for which the multiple choice trivia quiz mechanics are already in place, and will feature all of the weapon and stats mechanics that I envisioned when we first started. We intend to use the MVP for further pitching and playtesting while we work on the full game. This is where the story catches up to the present day, so this Devlog will now be a place for me to post development updates as they occur.

Thanks for reading!

The first of our weekly competitions will be posted tomorrow at 7pm UK time. Join the Discord server with the link above and keep one eye open!

A few days after the Guildford Game Festival we received the disappointing news that our application for the Games Finance Market at the London Games Festival 2023 was unsuccessful. We were very surprised by this as we had been met with such a positive response the previous year. This wasn’t going to dampen our spirits, however, and we set to work improving the pitch deck based on the advice from Fundamentally Games.

In March we pitched Quiz Quest to a handful of publishers who we thought would be a good fit for the game and our fledgling company. All of them rejected us, primarily saying the game wasn’t quite right for them. Admittedly, it is a difficult game to pitch because the concept is unfamiliar - it isn’t just an X type of game with a Y twist! We needed someone who was willing to take a risk, not just on the game but also on us - a team of two without any prior development experience (by this time Nate, the most experienced member of our team, had moved on to his own project). Sadly, our saviour was not among the publishers we submitted to. It was at this low point that we decided we were going to have to roll up our sleeves, open our wallets and make this game happen ourselves.

We had a couple of positive experiences in the summer when we were featured on Steam’s Next Fest and we were invited back to exhibit at the UKIE Festival of Play. In preparation, I had started improving the game’s art. Hiring a studio was out of the question financially speaking, so I researched the tips and tricks for how to upgrade my digital art and got to work. Both events went fairly well. We saw an uptick in our Steam wishlists following our moderately successful livestream, and, although it was quieter than the previous year, the Festival of Play was still a lot of fun.

In September we started working with a new developer who I found on the website Fiverr. His first task was to fix a lot of the bugs that had been plaguing the game since the beginning - mostly server connectivity stuff. We also welcomed our new Social Media Manager, Lizzie, who we desperately needed to revamp our online presence. All of this was in preparation for our most exciting event of the year: a slot presenting the game on the Barclays Rezzed Stage at EGX 2023…

Following our positive experience at the London Games Festival 2022, the next event to prepare for was the UKIE Festival of Play. This festival is geared towards school children, with a focus on educational games and careers in the gaming industry. Quiz Quest has definite potential as an educational game because of its focus on collaboration and because quizzes themselves are both a test of people’s knowledge and an opportunity for them to learn something new. The two major changes we made to the demo for the Festival of Play - in addition to the general improvements - were to buy in a database of age-appropriate educational questions and to add subtitles. Unfortunately, Nate was too busy to write the code that would control the subtitles, so I had to find a solution myself that wouldn’t require any coding. The rather inelegant solution that I came up with was to create image files for each subtitle and to activate them using triggers in FMOD and PlayMaker. It took a while to implement, but at least it worked! Michael and I had a really fun time at the festival. It was so encouraging to see the kids engaging with the game and working together to answer the questions. We also received positive feedback from the educators, who could see the potential of Quiz Quest as a learning tool.

Later the same month we went along to Develop:Brighton, where we met with more potential publishers, received even more positivity towards the game, but ultimately came away empty handed. Michael was convinced that the problems lay in our business model, budget and pitch deck, so he threw himself into getting those perfected, enlisting my help when needed to find the partner studios to whom we planned to outsource development, art and audio. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to build the prototype of the full game so I could see where improvements in the script and music needed to be made, and so we could have something that was as close to my vision for the final game as possible. Nate fixed a few of the major bugs in the server and devised a different way to present the subtitles, overhauling my clumsy solution. At the end of the year I conducted a few playtests of the prototype with friends and family from which I learned a great deal, primarily that Quiz Quest is the perfect game for a lazy post-Christmas afternoon!

2023 got off to a good start when we were fortunate enough to exhibit at the Guildford Games Festival. In preparation for that, Michael had begun posting on social media to generate interest for the event and to spread the word that Quiz Quest was coming soon. Meanwhile, I had completely revamped the demo after deciding to swap Sir Answerlot’s level with Robin Yewblind’s level, which throws the players directly into the action from the off. We had also decided to get Quiz Quest on Steam, as this would allow us to link publishers to our latest build, upload a demo that everyone with access to Steam can play, and allow Steam users to show their interest in the game by adding it to their wishlists. Setting up a Steam page proved to be a relatively simple process. If Michael and I can manage it ourselves, then anyone can!

On the day of the Guildford Games Festival, we again got a lovely response from everyone who was able to find our exhibition stand, and we also had a valuable chat about pitching with Oscar Clark of Fundamentally Games. The Fundamentally Games website is a fantastic resource for early stage game devs, with access to articles and webinars, an extensive list of financiers and publishers, and a template for creating a killer pitch deck. If you haven’t already, I suggest you check it out. https://www.fundamentally.games/

Then, a few days after the festival, we received some disappointing news…

In early 2022, all of our energy was going into preparing for the London Games Festival in April. We hadn’t made it into the official selection, but we weren’t really expecting to because the game was in such an early stage of development. However, attending the festival meant that we would have access to the Games Finance Market where we could pitch the game to publishers and investors. The two most important things we needed for this were a demo and a pitch deck. I left the pitch deck in Michael’s capable hands and set to work on the demo.

Nate had already done a fantastic job programming the server, the quiz rounds and everything else necessary to get the MVP to a playable state, but I felt that the art was severely lacking, primarily because it consisted of static images of the characters that I had drawn using my limited skills. In the final game I wanted fully animated characters against detailed backgrounds, as if the players were watching an interactive cartoon, but that was well beyond what I thought I could achieve on my own. In mid-2021 we had got a handful of artists to do some redesigns and animation tests for a couple of the characters and, although most of what they produced was good, none of it was enough to convince us to hire any of them. It’s hard to say exactly why, but none of them ‘got’ what I was aiming for with the art style. I think they each put too much of an individual spin on it instead of staying true to my concepts and improving the overall quality. But anyway, the situation at the start of 2022 was that we needed the visuals in the demo to reflect what we wanted for the finished game, all without spending a single penny. The simplest and cheapest solution was to do it myself, so I learned how to rig and animate 2D characters in Unity with the help of a few YouTube videos and animated the two characters we needed for the demo: Quizimojo, the Grand High Quizard, and Sir Answerlot, the drunken knight. I was pretty pleased with what I produced and I thought it would be enough to convince publishers and investors of what we were aiming for with the visuals, even if the quality of the art and animation itself wasn’t of a professional standard.

At the festival, we had a great time networking with other devs and industry people, attending talks which gave us valuable insight into the landscape of the gaming industry post-pandemic, and meeting with publishers, investors and potential collaborators. We spoke to people from Barclays, Microsoft, Amazon, LEGO and Team17, to name a few of the big hitters, and the impression that we got from everyone we met and who played the demo was that Quiz Quest was definitely worth pursuing. The most constructive feedback we got came from Simon Smith of Team17. The meeting was brutal at the time - he really tore into the concepts and the mechanics - but everything he said came from a place of wanting the game to be as good as it could be. Nor did he spoon-feed us the solutions. Yes, we came away from his meeting empty handed in terms of a publisher, but we came away with the knowledge that the game was far from ready and that no publisher was going to touch it until we had given every element of gameplay serious consideration. My naïve assumption was that someone would sweep us under their wing like a guardian angel and mentor us to the finished game, helping us refine the concepts and mechanics as we progressed, but this meeting with Simon showed me that that was simply not the case. It’s not enough to have a great idea for a game; you need to put the work in to make that idea a tangible reality.

My two main takeaways from the meeting with Simon were: 1) that if we really wanted Quiz Quest to be collaborative rather than competitive, we needed to emphasise and incentivise collaboration much more, and 2) that the ‘quiz’ element and the ‘quest’ element needed to be bound together much more closely so that the players always felt like they were working towards their ultimate goal. My solution for problem one was to rewrite Quizimojo’s introduction so that he stressed the importance of collaboration and clearly explained that bonus Quids would be earned if all of the players answered the same question correctly. I also thought that an on-screen notification that the team bonus had been awarded would be a good indicator for the players that their collaboration is paying off.

Problem two required much deeper thought as the solution had the potential to change the game completely. Originally I had just mashed together the two concepts of ‘quiz’ and ‘quest’ thinking that the connection was obvious - players need to quiz in order to progress through the quest - and assuming that the players would naturally try to reach the highest score possible even if they didn’t know how high that score could be. But, as Simon rightly said, that wasn’t enough. He felt the gameplay was too disjointed between the quiz rounds and the quest interactions because there wasn’t a measurable goal towards which the players were working besides reaching the end of the story. My first solution was for Sir Answerlot to set a target Quid score that the players had to reach in order to gain access to the final round in the dragon’s lair. However, this didn’t solve the problem of finding an ultimate goal for the players because, once they reached the final round, they still wouldn’t be sure exactly what they were aiming for besides defeating the dragon. The solution I finally hit upon was to set a target Quid score for the whole quest and to have Quizimojo explain at the start (and give reminders throughout) that the players need to reach this total over the course of their quest in order to achieve the rank of Master Quizards. Now the players would always have their target Quid score in mind throughout the quest and would view each quiz round as an opportunity to work towards that target.

After the London Games Festival, we had a few more exciting events lined up in 2022, so I set to work incorporating these improvements into the demo…

In the previous post, I mentioned that our first goal was to create a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) that would have everything necessary to demonstrate the core concepts and mechanics of Quiz Quest to potential investors and early playtesters. At first we were developing the game for remote team-building, with me presenting live whilst sharing my screen with the players via video call, and the players each using their phones to interact with the game. For this we needed some kind of online server to which each player could connect, and which could send the quiz questions and dialogue options to the players whilst keeping track of their scores and progress. Nate, our original developer, decided to use AWS, and it has served us pretty well ever since. We also decided to use Unity to create what would be presented on the shared screen. I think we chose Unity mostly because it has the visual scripting tool, PlayMaker, which allowed me to do the leg-work of building the scenes without touching a single line of code (phew!). Nate created all of the unique ‘Actions’ that we needed for the MVP at this stage. These included: presenting the visuals on the shared screen, showing the script to me on a private screen, triggering the music, displaying the scores, and sending the various choices to the players (dialogue options, weapon select, player select).

Nate also coded the four core quiz rounds that would be included in the MVP, each of them a variation of the multiple choice general knowledge format which is the main type of round in the game. The first round - for the first scene of the game where the failed knight, Sir Answerlot, tests the players’ abilities before sending them off on their quest - is a straight-up multiple choice general knowledge quiz of twelve questions (plus a bonus round of three more questions if the players fail) to introduce the basic mechanics. The second round - for the bow-and-arrow-wielding highwayman, Robin Yewblind - is a knockout round for individual players where one player chooses the category for another and risks them getting knocked out if they get it wrong. It also has a double-or-nothing bonus round of three questions for if the players fail. The third - for a flock of winged Ice Demons - is a quick-fire round with each player answering as many questions as they can against the clock. The fourth - for the final encounter against the evil dragon, Spontanius the Combustor - is six rounds of five tricky questions on a specified topic, each of which one of the players must face alone. In this round, the players can also make use of the Quiztals they have collected throughout the game to answer as a team and multiply their score.

For setting up the music to be triggered in Unity, we decided to use FMOD Studio because its user interface is similar to that of audio production software like Logic and Reaper, with which I am very familiar. (Again, I can work in FMOD without knowing a single thing about code!) It was all very intuitive and I soon learned my way around it, setting up loops, triggers and parameters so that the music could flow seamlessly between tracks based on the various commands from within PlayMaker.

Before we had the completed MVP, life was returning to some kind of normality after the COVID-19 lockdowns, so our focus shifted away from remote team-building with a live host to creating a fully automated game for general release. This meant scrapping the private screen for showing me the script, and automating the now pre-recorded dialogue using FMOD and PlayMaker. So, while I got to work recording, editing and incorporating the dialogue, Michael set about finding us potential investment. By an amazing stroke of luck, we were able to secure passes to the London Games Festival 2022 and access to the Games Finance Market where we could pitch Quiz Quest to publishers and investors. The festival was in April and there was still a lot of preparation to be done, not least creating a demo which would win people over…

To get advice on how best to create a system for Quiz Quest that would simultaneously handle presenting and scoring I got in touch with our original developer, Nate, who was the go-to guy for all things computers when I was at uni. Together with Michael, we hashed out ideas for the prototype and landed on Jackbox-style gameplay with players connecting and playing using their phones as they watched a shared central screen via video call. I would still be presenting live, as remote team-building remained our focus, but the idea of automating the game was recognised as a development for the future. So, while I digitised the placeholder artwork, made my first pass at composing the soundtrack and rewrote the script based on the feedback from our early playtesters, Nate began coding a system which had everything we needed for an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that I could then use to build the prototype of the game (more about the MVP next time).

One suggestion for the script rewrite that came up during a playtesting session with some writer friends of mine was to give the players the choice of how to respond during character interactions. My first draft just had set lines that the players were expected to speak, which meant they didn’t have much agency, so giving them the option of what to say would put them more in control of the interaction and make it more of a personal experience. Multiple dialogue options would also add to the game’s replayability, so I was definitely on board. It meant a lot more work for me, rewriting every scene with multiple dialogue branches, but it was a lot of fun; I could flesh out the characters more, indulge in some world-building and add lots more humour. Hopefully it pays off in the final game!

As for the soundtrack, I knew I wanted a big orchestral score with an adventurous, fantastical and tongue-in-cheek style that would do a lot of the storytelling for me and make up for the current lack of motion in the visuals and the absence of sound effects (which were too much for me to incorporate as a live presenter). I started by writing the important themes that would recur throughout the score: a folksy tune for the village of Derring-Do, a noble horn theme for Sir Answerlot, a twisted minor-mode theme for Spontanius the Combustor, an energetic theme for the highwayman Robin Yewblind, a joyful motif for the Quiztals (magical objects that the players collect) and two themes for the players themselves which would feature prominently in the ‘Main Title’ music - one representing their adventurous spirit and one representing their cooperation. In addition to the main title and the end credits, there were nine scenes which each required a cue of background music that could loop, introductory music and short cues for success and failure when the scene ended. Some of them also required additional cues for different character interactions within a scene, as well as battles, chases and the quiz rounds. I hadn’t written this much music in years, but I had been relishing such an opportunity since leaving uni, so I threw myself into it with enthusiasm and had the first pass of the full score completed in a couple of months.

Digitising the artwork was a far tougher job than writing the script and composing the music because I hadn’t really drawn anything since doing GCSE Art. But because, at this stage, I thought that all we needed was some placeholder artwork that would then be completely overhauled by a team of experienced professionals once we secured funding, I decided to do it myself. I got myself a tablet, downloaded the best recommended free art software out there (Krita) and got to work. Being such a novice, I had no idea about important things like perspective and proportions, and simple things like line weight and which brushes to use. I just found the easiest, quickest way to get all of the placeholder artwork that we needed so there would be at least something vaguely like what I wanted on screen for the players to look at. I kept the character designs super simple (most of it based off of the pencil drawings I had done for the earliest playtests) and the backgrounds more abstract than detailed. It didn’t look great by any means, but I thought it was good enough for our purposes.

Before we had a prototype in place, the COVID-19 lockdowns were coming to an end, so our focus shifted from remote corporate team-building with a live host to developing a fully automated game for general release…

Part II - Making Preparations...

Having decided to develop Quiz Quest as a game for remote team-building, I got to work writing a proper script with a broader appeal. A ‘sword and sorcery’ fantasy setting felt like the right choice as it is rich with character archetypes and story tropes that can be humorously adapted to incorporate quizzing. (Plus, it meant I could compose a grandiose orchestral soundtrack! Win win!) The script I wrote worked kind of like a play script with lines for me to perform as the various characters the players encountered and lines that the players themselves would be expected to speak as required. I included some variations in the script for certain encounters which would be determined by the players’ stats and weapon choices.

Individual player stats were something I wanted in the game from the very beginning along with weapons that could function both as power-ups when quizzing and as items for dealing with the more dangerous character interactions. (Nearly four years down the line we are only just getting these features implemented!) My idea was that each of the six stats would be linked to both a character trait and (unbeknownst to the players) to one of the six question categories. Originally, the traits had an effect on how the other characters perceived the players (eg. if the players were high in Wisdom they would be treated with respect by more intelligent characters) and the outcome of the players’ weapon uses (eg. if the players were high in Strength they would be certain to defeat a weak opponent). At the start of the game, each player would order their six stats based purely on the six character traits. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, each stat would also order the six question categories for each player, which would affect the category and difficulty of the questions they would receive. I wanted to keep the question category element of the stats a secret from the players because I wanted the players to feel more immersed in the world and the story instead of being focused on the quiz questions. I am still debating whether this is the right decision or not, as part of me thinks that many players will want to decide upfront which question categories they favour.

Once I had a first draft of the script, I moved on to creating the placeholder artwork using the drawing skills that I hadn’t employed since GCSE Art lessons. I then put this artwork into Powerpoint slides as an easy way to present the visuals during our proof-of-concept demonstrations for friends. Our original business model was that I would perform the script live whilst simultaneously moving between slides, cueing background music and keeping the scores. As for the scores, Michael had been busy converting the Excel scoring system I had made into a ‘Quizmaster Dashboard’ (image below) which incorporated the script and player stats (and a ‘Luck’ modifier, which was fun). This method of presentation worked reasonably well for the few demonstrations that we did, but ultimately we agreed that we needed to find a better way to deal with the juggling act of presenting and scoring, preferably one that didn’t rely on Powerpoint and Excel!

Enter Nate, our original developer…

Hello there! I’m Joe Newton the creator of Quiz Quest, a co-operative quiz party game with a choose-your-own-adventure story played through a desktop screen and smartphones. 2-6 players must work together to achieve a high enough score to become Master Quizards. To do this they must progress through a light-hearted fantasy story in which each interactive encounter develops into a quiz round of some sort.

I originally posted this devlog earlier this year on Gamedev.net, so I thought I'd try to reach a wider audience by posting here for all you lovely itchy people. A little disclaimer: I am not very technically minded, so this devlog won’t contain the nitty-gritty details of coding etc., but I will talk about as much as I can from all aspects of the development process. I’ll start by telling the story of the game’s development up until the present day and then move on to updates about new developments as they happen.

By the way, Quiz Quest has a Steam page so, if you haven’t already, take a look, wishlist the game and play the demo! The demo is due an update in about a month, so watch out for that. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2276840/Quiz_Quest/

We also do monthly livestreams on Twitch: twitch.tv/quizimojo Our next stream will be on Saturday 7th September at 8pm. I will be hosting a "Quiz Knight" to celebrate my birthday and I will also be sharing a sneak peak at more of the game. Come one, come all!

On with the devlog…

This is my first professional venture into the world of game dev, and I may be biting off a bit more than I can chew with Quiz Quest. My only previous experience was writing the music for a game project at uni. I’m an actor and composer by trade, and I also dabble in writing now and again. As an actor, I have collaborated on several projects, including three indie feature films - Lah Di Dah (2022), Dogwood (2021) and DON’T. STOP. RUNNING. (2019) - the web series Popeye’s Island Adventures (2018-2019) and the award-winning Captain Morgan comedy shows by TapTap Theatre (2013-2016). As a composer, I wrote the soundtrack for a Star Wars fan film, Dawn of Resistance (2016), and my library music has been used on the BBC, Channel 5 and several overseas productions. As a writer, in 2018 I penned a dark stage adaptation of The Jungle Book for which I also composed and performed the music, assisted with the direction and design, and played the character of Bagheera.

So far on Quiz Quest I have been responsible for everything creative: story, script, design, music, sound and voiceover. I have also been integral to the technical development of the game, as most of the concepts for quiz rounds and game mechanics have come from me, and I have been heavily involved in building the game itself in Unity using the coding framework put in place by our original developer.

I came up with the concept for Quiz Quest during the first lockdown of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The film and theatre projects that I was set to work on were cancelled or postponed, and whilst on furlough for my day job as a support worker I needed a creative project to occupy my mind. To stave off boredom and to stay connected with friends, Michael Page (co-founder of Quiztal Games) and I started doing video call quizzes with our friendship group’s quiz team, The Pheasant Pluckers. I got tired of Michael always winning, so I decided to shake up the usual competitive model with a collaborative quiz where everyone had to work together. I also used this as an opportunity to flex my creative muscles by structuring the quiz around a bizarre story featuring a neon Jack-in-the-box, a defrosted caveman, a spelling beast and a mastermind villain. I bodged together some very simple art for the characters and made a rudimentary scoring system in Excel. For the quiz rounds I used questions from the board games Trivial Pursuit and Linkee, I found a load of tricky words for the spelling beast’s round and I wrote some questions myself for the mastermind’s round based on my friends’ specialist subjects. Michael loved it and immediately saw the format’s potential for use in online corporate team-building, as remote working was becoming so prevalent at the time.

So, with Michael investigating the business side of things, I got to work writing a proper script…