Trivial Guesser: Flags of the World is out as of this morning! Check it out, leave a review, and let me know what you think!

P.S. Here's a few hints for the current daily categories:

Americas - This is a state of the USA

Eurasia - Associated with China

Africa + Oceania - Think of one of the words from the name of the category..

Thanks for reading, and as always feedback is welcome

Hello!

Trivial Guesser is still slated to release on November 1, but before the game is out I wanted to drop some more info on a few of the changes in this version of the game.

Guesser Challenges are being introduced as a way to give you the ability to actually have a good amount of gameplay from the start. With the first iteration of Guesser, all categories were tied to a daily clock with guessing challenges rotating daily. This meant you could only play up to four new games a day. Challenges aim to fix this slow drip-feed of content by introducing a static set of challenges available from Day 1. These challenges do not rotate, and all can be played as whenever you first encounter the game.

Daily challenges with more specific categories are also still around but will be a little different as well. The number of unique days/questions per daily category are more prominently displayed so you'll know whether where the game is at in its rotation.

Gameplay itself has also changed - there's now no maximum amount of guesses you have and there's no real fail-state in the game. You can guess as many times as you want for as long as you want! Hints are also structured differently - there are now three hints that are unlocked over the span of four guesses. If you guess correctly before all hints are displayed, you'll get to see all the hints too!

The placeholder text for backspace and enter will be fixed before November 1

Trivial Guesser has pretty much been re-built and only uses a small portion of the previous game's codebase (mostly NG-related stuff). This will hopefully result in a smoother experience with less bugs and more gameplay!

Thanks for reading!

Work on Trivial Guesser is going well and we should be good to go for a November submission! Majority of the UI is built with a final pass and cleanup aimed for the very end of the month.

This week I finalized an internal tool to convert a modified version of the Trivial Trivia CSV files we use to work with the Guesser series. This means we'll need to be hands-on with new Guesser releases going forward, but less so than before which is our aim for the complete re-write/reboot. Work is being done on the Flag categories and we've finalized 65 days/question sets for two of the three planned categories. We'll most likely need to craft questions from the Oceania region and merge them into an Africa/Oceania category to get all three categories at the standard minimum.

An overhaul to the codebase is currently underway as well, which involves more efficient loading of trivia pack data, switching between categories/modes, and a better display of information. This will most likely be completed over the next week as I'm looking to toss out all the old logic in the previous game since it is subpar in my opinion (exception being with the virtual keyboard, that thing was a beast to code without external tools...).This will also includes new additions to the game as well, one such feature being a 'static' set of guesser questions that can be played any day.

One major challenge has been to work all game logic into a single 'stage' file (down from 2 from the previous entry, TT uses 4 stages) so we can have the Newgrounds API automatically sign users in and keep them signed in for the entire game session. It's a good amount of work but we think it will pay off.

Appless is currently working on a few new audio files for the game to better differentiate it from the Trivia series, so UI elements and sounds will be different than what you've heard over the last few submissions!

Thanks for reading, and we hope you'll give the game a try on release!

While appless works to finish up Trivial Trivia this week, I've started on the recreation of Trivial Guesser - whole new look, codebase, and topics! Here's a sneak peek of the startup screen I've worked on over the last night - just need to make sure it's mobile-friendly before release!

Hello - here's a quick post outlining a few small changes to the Holidays and Celebrations submission. Today has seen more code cleanup and additional safeguards built into internal tools to flag for pack issues upon compiling them for the game. No new questions yet, although we've developed 15 new questions for South Africa that'll be published alongside the rest of the question updates!

Now for the changes to the live game -

• Stats and Select screens are getting combined! The stats button on the select screen will now just display those text stats over the trivia pack description. Viewing questions now has a button on the main select screen.
• Buttons are more colorful! Hovering over more buttons will now show a green or white striped background.
• Arrow key keybindings on title screen now properly work for select, endless, and leaderboard screens.
• Fixed overlapping titles and images in various screens (leaderboard gamemode image & title was a really bad offender)

I've also adjusted keybindings for other areas of the game to accommodate for the changes today.

While this may be a minor change, we hope it makes viewing stats and info easier than before.

Thanks for reading!

Over the weekend another Trivial Trivia entry has been released! This collection is somewhat unusual as it focused heavily on countries that may or may not reflect the target demographic of the site. I'll touch on this a little further in the post but wanted to also thank everyone for allowing the submission to rank daily fifth!

Day 1 Minor Updates & Bugfixes

Day 1 has concluded and has seen a few updates for the game. Firstly, all trivia packs with issues are fixed, and all NG integration issues have been addressed.

To overview the changes from today, here's a list!

• Fixed South Africa and Canada packs with bad data (resulted in broken questions and gameplay)
• Added preliminary error checking to internal generation tools to catch future issues with packs.
• Fixed issue with Canada 90 NG medal - was missing one digit of it's medal ID.
• Fixed issues with mobile experience during gameplay - clipping backgrounds + off-center text especially on new trivia pack themes.
• Added more noticeable animations to trivia themes and buttons (inspired from @FutureCopLGF's review on another collection).
• Removed animations from Endless information block - added tiled background to buttons on hover instead.
• Changed buttons on question review page - these buttons will now display a portion of the question text for easier viewing! The old 'elevator pad' look is gone at last!
• Changed animations on first-load page and title page - let me know what you think about the circle-in and out!

Planned Updates

We've mentioned adding new questions to the game and this has been delayed to allow us more time to address under-the-hood changes we're wanting to focus on including those outline above. Minor updates to packs and questions are still planned for later this week. We'd really like to see all packs above 45 questions and that will be the goal to reach by Friday.

Weekend Stats

What's a new trivia submission post without some stats?

Firstly, I'd like to mention this collection received a higher than normal visit to question sources than previous submissions for the first day. I'm also happy to see a lot more quiz sessions compared to total views for both days! Both days had a good amount of submissions and views which I am happy with as well.

Closing Thoughts

After receiving feedback on the collection we've realized the initial goal of releasing a pack without US/UK trivia to 'guide' players to either learning or brute-forcing their way through different country celebrations may not have been the most well-executed idea. We're happy to have ranked 5th overall for movies and games, but with the wider audience of Newgrounds seeing the submission today it's become apparent that not everyone liked the game.

I am happy that we've put forth a collection that is not composed of 'expected' countries or well-known topics, however we'll be taking some time to reflect on the reception and determine how we can best introduce our planned volume 2 for holidays and celebrations in December. The leading idea thus far is to focus less on holiday specifics or make the initial question lead into an answer, but nothing is confirmed yet.

In the meantime, work on the revival of Trivial Gauntlet will start up at the end of this week once we have the next minor update for this submission out of the way.

Thanks for reading!

That new Trivial Trivia game will be dropping later today/Saturday - keep an eye out for it!

Releasing the first weekend in October, Trivial Trivia: Holidays and Celebrations will feature updated visuals, new endless features, and of course new trivia! Here's a peek at what's coming next week:

New Endless Mode

With the introduction of a basic endless mode for our Flags of the World collection, endless mode will be back with a new unranked mode! This mode will be more relaxed and provide you with more time and lives to play everything. Ranked mode will also integrate NG leaderboards onto it's gamemode tile for easy viewing of rankings in-game.

There's still a good amount of work to do with this display, but here's a sneak peek!

Appless has also created a separate main theme that will play on this screen + the trivia - it's a loop that'll be a little longer than the normal pack loops!

Pack Topics

This submission will focus on specific country holidays, celebrations, and annual events. This includes history, dates, and festivities around the events. Holidays like Christmas, Labo(u)r Day, and New Years will be included with some questions tailored around unique ways each country celebrates these holidays.

We plan on releasing trivia packs for six countries, three of which I'll list below!

• Mexico
• Brazil
• New Zealand

I will also confirm the US, UK, and Australia will not be included in this collection. stay tuned for the release later this year which may include those countries!

QOL Updates

Besides optimizing code for trivia and endless mode handling, there's a few QoL features visible for this next release. Some goodies include:

• Reduced motion further on title screen (removal of some fast-moving backgrounds, made other elements static) when motion is toggled.
• Optimized images for better display and loading on title screen.
• Background 'trivial trivia!' text now moves!
• Some title buttons will now display a colored background on hover.
• Modified text sizing and display across screens for consistency.
• Overhauled mobile elements and displays. It is now much easier to navigate, view packs, and play the game from your phone! Sidenote: mobile full-screen mode still has some issues during gameplay. I'm looking into fixes for this with the codebase overhaul later this year.
• 

Thanks for reading!

Team Trivial Roadmap for 2024

Looking to the Future Pt. 2

Hello, Kabobble here (with small edits from appless)!

Curious about our future projects for the rest of the year? Look no further! We've got our plans and timeline laid out below until the end of December 2024. An infographic can also be viewed here and at the bottom of this post.

Why post this?

We are posting our desired timeline for the rest of the year so everyone knows our plans, schedule, and what to expect from us for the next few months. Before diving in, I would like to mention the feature-side of the Trivia series will be slowing down for reasons explained below. These plans are also not anything final - we can modify timelines, plans, and scopes based on feedback and suggestions as always!

Now that we're through with that, let's dive in!

September 2024

Endless mode for Trivial Trivia: Flags of the World is planned to release by end of September.

September is already halfway over, but we'd like to push out one final update to the Flags of the World submission. We've received feedback requesting an 'endless' mode and I think I can get something programmed in the next week or so to accommodate this! The original plan was to overhaul most of the Trivial Trivia codebase and release a feature that would fulfill this request in December (see Trivial Gauntlet) but I'd like to bump that up and do something before month's end.

Endless mode will be, well, endless and have the potential to cover every question in the submission. There will be some limitations and rules however, which include:

• If you guess incorrectly, your endless 'run' ends. This can be subverted however by paying a Trivial Token cost much like you do to unlock questions in the packs if you guess incorrectly.
• New questions will be added for Oceania and Central America. Unfortunately we do not plan to release a pack covering these flags but with some fenagling we should be able to add these unlisted questions into endless mode.
• There will be no new medals for this mode. I would like to add in leaderboards, but that's a maybe at this point.
• Question statistics will not be logged. This means any questions viewed in endless mode will not count towards view/correct stats when reviewing questions and answers. This is a hard limit with the current handling of questions & trivia sessions that will require some of that code re-work I plan to complete later this year.

Beyond these tidbits, I hope you'll enjoy the endless mode when it releases!

October 2024

Trivial Trivia: Holidays of the World Vol. 1 will release the first Friday or Saturday of October.

This may be one of our first controversial releases as it's a planned two-part submission. Initially planned to be one large collection covering 10+ regions, appless and I found out quickly many countries both large and small have very unique cultures and holidays we'd like to give proper attention to. For example, we had planned to write a North American holiday trivia pack, but between Canada, Mexico, and the USA, many holidays that share the same name do not share the same day, festivities, or even origin!

For example, it would be frustrating to lump in 5-10 questions about Thanksgiving or Labo(u)r day in North America when the details of country and region would need to be specified anyway. This led us to discovering even more unique holidays and celebrations and felt it would make sense to make a pack for each country, not geographical region like we had done with flags.

These country packs will consist of a minimum of 40 (aim of 50) questions. We can confirm two of the trivia packs are for New Zealand and Mexico. Instead of releasing an update to this submission over the rest of 2024, we'll instead release a new submission in December covering more countries.

We feel this is the best way to handle this on Newgrounds for a few reasons, including:

• What you see is what you get - I am a believer of releasing a game in a state I am happy to call finished. If I were to release this game with the pretense of releasing periodic updates for it I'd be afraid expectations would not be set appropriately. I also take ratings and comments seriously and believe players on Day 1 will not be back on Day 30.
• Digestible size - I believe submissions with 5-7 trivia packs is easy to play without getting too overwhelmed. I'd be afraid too many packs in one submission would either dilute the content or create too many options for players which would result in packs and questions being skipped over or ignored.
• Lack of update recognition - It's difficult for games that receive updates to get noticed.
• Medals - We feel releasing new medals would not be appreciated to players who have 'completed' the game by unlocking all medals. We also want to make sure we can release medals for all trivia packs without hitting the 1000 point per submission limit.

I understand this may ultimately strike a nerve for some users, but hope you understand my point of view with this multi-release.

October will not introduce any new features beyond new audio, trivia themes, and QOL updates to Trivial Trivia. My focus will be on rewriting the Trivial Guesser codebase for November. Speaking of....

November 2024

Trivial Guesser makes a return with flags and 60+ days of content!

Tentative Trivial Trivia submission if we have time.

Trivial Guesser will be making a return. After a shaky launch this summer I am looking to re-write most of the codebase to improve quality and playability. Work on this rewrite begins in October and Guesser will release on the first of the month. This will also be the first Trivial Guesser submission to support images in hints/gameplay.

Most content from this release will come from the September release of Trivial Trivia. This allows us to offer 60+ days of content across multiple categories without overworking us too much. We'll be watching this submission closely for feedback and comments!

If all goes well in October/early November, we will release a TBD Trivial Trivia submission mid-month. We have a few Wishlist topics we'd like to hit on, so stay tuned on further news here.

I also plan to spend this month re-writing the core of Trivial Trivia to accommodate for better multi-pack handling and gameplay modifiers. This includes creating a spin-off of the current codebase for Trivial Gauntlet.

December 2024

Trivial Guesser strikes again with holidays + a mid-month update for 45+ days of content!

Trivial Trivia releases holiday volume 2 trivia collection!

Welcome to something new - Trivial Gauntlet!

And potentially a surprise for Christmas....

December will be our busy month with releases and we're excited for it!

Trivial Guesser

Trivial Guesser will release on December 1 with the topic of worldwide holidays. When Trivial Trivia releases the week after, a content update will be pushed, increasing the day content to 45+ days.

Trivial Trivia

This will be volume/part 2 of the topic we're releasing in October. This will cover 6+ new countries and their holidays. We can confirm two trivia packs for this submission will be India and the USA.

Trivial Gauntlet

Think of an endless trivia session, but with modifiers and lives! This release will feature every trivia pack from every Trivial Trivia submission in 2024. The game will include:

• Ranked Gauntlet - All questions from all trivia packs released in 2024. You have a set number of wrong answers. How far can you go? NG Leaderboards and medals will be active for this mode.
• Unranked Gauntlet - A more relaxed mode. You have 3 minutes to answer questions, 100 lives - it's just more chill! NG Leaderboards will be active for this mode.
• Daily Gauntlets - Rotating challenges that focus on specific topics (Holidays of Oceania, Flags of the Americas, Newgrounds Animation, Newgrounds Info & History, etc.) that are created by combining specific trivia packs. Modifiers (time to answer, X lives, no true/false, etc.) are also applied! NG Leaderboards and medals will be active for this mode.

We also plan to release small content updates for all trivia packs in this pack, so you'll see some new stuff!

Trivia packs won't be able to be played independently in this release but questions can be reviewed and sourced as always. This will be our ultimate release for the year which is moreso a celebration of trivia and what we've done in 2024!

December will also feature a potential surprise on Christmas day... This surprise is quite an undertaking so we aren't ready to commit to it just yet, but if we can pull it off we think it'll be received positively across the board!

Here's an infographic courtesy of appless on what I just wrote, but simplified:

Looking at 2025

While we have no developed plans for 2025 just yet, I will spoil a feature update to the Trivial Trivia series for January! From January going forward, all new Trivial Trivia submissions will feature Trivial Gauntlet as a playable gamemode. This mode will officially introduce 'endless' mode for all new trivia submissions alongside daily challenges and modifiers you'll see in our December release. The reason this will take so long to release is due to needing the few months to re-write a lot of the gameplay functionality to accommodate questions being pulled from multiple packs (this was never scoped/planned when building the codebase in May). We also hope having a few months to build this out will make it a feature worth playing again and again!

Closing Thoughts

We have quite a few releases planned for this year, and we're excited to get to work and show you some great trivial games! As always, we love to hear comments, feedback, and questions from anyone!

Thanks for reading!

- Kabobble & applessmillion

Hello!

A minor update has been pushed for the Trivial Trivia: Flags of the World game. This update adds more in-depth stat tracking for questions you encounter during trivia sessions. On the question review screen, you'll now see number of times you've viewed a question alongside the number of times you've answered it correctly.

Once you load up the game your existing save data will be converted to accommodate for these changes. These new stats will apply to all new trivia sessions as the game was not tracking number of views/correct/incorrect answers prior to today.

If you notice any serious bugs or issues, please DM me! While this is a trivial change on the front-facing side of the game, it's been quite a bit of work on the backend. For example, the top list of numbers in the below picture is the old format, and the bottom display is the new format