Hello everyone!

I hope this post will be the first of a short series going out throughout this month + october. I'm looking to outline the Trivial series of games and and where we are, where we're going, and how you can help. This post will heavily focus on the now and short-term future, including plans to reboot Trivial Guesser. Future posts will aim to tackle the where we're going and how you can help.

Trivial Trivia

Trivial Trivia has been in my opinion a successful (albeit short) series that started this summer. We've gained wonderful feedback from the community, had 2/3 Trivia entries featured on the front page, and even had Team Trivial's debut game score in the top 5 games for June 2024! The latest entry has seen over 6,000 plays in less than a week and appears to have been received very well. I believe the additional week we took to build out picture-based trivia paid off and appless and I are looking to continually introduce new ideas and features into these games going forward.

Regarding the now and short-term future for the series, we aim to stick to a monthly release for Trivial Trivia going forward and we're excited to announce plans for trivia collections to lead us through the year. Stay tuned for more details about those. Current plans to enhance gameplay and keep things interesting include:

• Implement better keyboard support, and investigate browser-based controller support.
• Enhance layout of screens - we believe the current layout is fine, but can be improved.
• Completely overhaul the mobile UI for the game - it's done us well so far but I believe it can vastly be improved to enhance navigation, display of information, among other things. The grid layouts and question/session review screens are big ticket items for me.
• Implement new and fun gameplay features, including one which I will tease below..
• Investigate potential ways for further community collaboration and introduction of community-submitted trivia (this is very long-term but I wanted to mention this as a wishlist item)

We are also evaluating other forms of trivia setups to try and gain inspiration for question phrasing, potential features, and more. For example, I came into this series inspired to make a Jackbox-style game in terms of visuals while creating trivia that was informative, fun, and would allow to research more into something and learn (biggest motivator behind the sources & question review). Other forms of trivia, such as pub trivia, multiplayer competitive trivia, and trivia through other mediums have not had any inspiration drawn into these submissions. We'd like to expand our ideas on what trivia can be and introduce new features and ideas if we find something fun. This is something we've begun exploring this month and will share any inspirations we get in the future.

Trivial Guesser

This series has been on hiatus due to unexpected issues and a poor to mediocre reception of the initial release, which I will mostly take blame for. The programming behind the game was built in 3 weeks, with modifications rolling throughout the 2 weeks post-release. It was far from smooth sailing. The plan is to re-write most programming from the initial release to improve every aspect of the game. appless and I would like to see the re-launch of the series in November replacing Trivial Trivia for the month.

As for content, our aim will be to instead of introducing a unique category/collection for the series, to re-use some questions and ideas from the Trivial Trivia release of the prior month. For example, we plan to release the next Guesser game with many questions and answers taken from the Flags of the World TT game (this will also formally add support for picture-based dailies to the series). We're interested in feedback of this idea, so please let us know what you think either below or when the game releases. New content will be added, and we plan to introduce Oceania and Central American flags into this game as daily answers for example.

This plan will play into a few factors I'm looking at for our overall Trivia submissions, which include:

• Allowing for players to learn and reinforce new information (You learn some stuff from the Trivia game released the month prior to help you answer dailies in the game)
• Providing games with replayability - Trivia games have enough questions that you'll never see them all in 1 session, Guesser games have daily content you come back to play.
• Having a healthy stream of higher-quality quiz content that is engaging, fun, and easy to play on mobile and desktop.

Finally, with the plan to re-use content and questions from Trivial Trivia, we plan to extend support for daily sessions in all Guesser games to a minimum of 75 days, with the Flags of the World game launching with a minimum of 80 days of playable questions. This is a major enhancement over our initial launch which included 33 or so dailies.

New Trivial Game

A new Trivial submission will be a short-lived series as we plan to integrate this as a brand new feature in the Trivial Trivia games going forward from either October or November. This should increase competitiveness in leaderboards and give you new daily content to experience. As a lot has changed since June in terms of programming & backend changes, it will require time for me to integrate this as a feature into the Trivial Trivia series, and is impossible to integrate this into previous entries.

Just to illustrate some of these changes in the formatting level of things, here's a version 1 trivia pack (All About Newgrounds) versus a version 3 trivia pack (Flags of North America) - this also does not include the tips/hints format 1 lacked!

We will have more information on this game and how it will integrate into Trivial Trivia with the next update. Our current plan will be to release two of these games to catch-up to the existing entries and then fully integrate this game as a new feature to the core Trivia series in the December release. The two releases will have the topics of:

• Summer of Trivia (Newgrounds Collection, Video Game Consoles collection, potential Q/As from Trivial Guesser release)
• Countries of the World TBD Title (Flags of the World, October Trivia submission)

All trivia packs from the Newgrounds collection will need to be re-written with an additional 2 tips. All trivia packs from the Video Game Console collection will need to be regenerated from their CSV to account for some minor JSON formatting changes. Anything released after September should be OK as long as I don't make any major changes again...

Stay tuned to learn more about this game, its features, and more.

Wrapup

Thanks for reading about the short-term future of our Trivial games! We'll plan to release a roadmap along with further details about the mentioned games soon. If you have any input or comment you'd like leave, feel free to shoot me a DM or leave a comment below.

Another day, another post of stats and info for Trivial Trivia!

I'll try to keep this one brief and get right to it...

Small Update now live

All trivia packs now feature at least 50 questions! This was an update to content specifically targeted at the Asia and South America packs - see if you can answer the new questions!

This has bumped the total question count across packs above 270 which more than we were hoping to release with. In the future we plan to introduce trivia packs with at minimum 40 questions with an aim of 50-60. This allows for packs to be replayed at minimum 3 times before you would see everything!

Game Frontpaged

Thanks to the site & those who recommended the game to be featured on the front page of Newgrounds! This has introduced many new people to Trivial Trivia with what the we believe is a strong release to the series. We also appreciate everyone who has liked, played, rated, and engaged with the game so far.

Day 2 Stats

There's some stats to show, and here they are!

What we can see is the majority of users are guests again as a small percentage are using the NG integration. i do not have specific numbers, but can tell a lot more people could sign in per the number of unlocks we have on the freebie medal that is given out prior to loading the title screen.

To reiterate - we would love to auto-sign in Newgrounds users to the game and can do so on the white loading page only. This game has ~4 HTML pages that it navigates between. Once you navigate off this first page the game loses your session. I'm looking at potential workarounds but this may just be how it works in the series as the game is pretty complex.

Just like yesterday, we see more quiz session than users - which is great and what we want to see. For those signed in, we see an average of ~1.8 score submissions per user which is nice.

I'll plan to post a week-end review potentially along a bigger update regarding the TT series later. In the meantime...

thanks for reading!

k

What a good day for trivia, flag trivia that is!

In case you've missed it, a new Trivial Trivia game was released at the very end of the day on Friday. Since release, the game has received a few updates and fixes I will briefly mention below:

• New questions for some trivia packs - total questions are now above 250!
• Optimized loading of title screen! A new 'loading' text will also appear to show you progress.
• Optimized trivia session data when submitting to Newgrounds. This should be an invisible change but improves a few things & opens us up to potentially adding a new leaderboard type.
• Changed how 'correct' answers are displayed on the session review screen - unlocked questions no longer count towards correctly answered questions.
• Fixed visual bug resulting in some packs having the 'silver' medal when they should have been bronze.
• Fixed geo_noire style preventing button presses in some situations for mobile.
• Fixed certain trivia packs having unexpected answers listed for questions (blank buttons, double-listed answers).
• Fixed issue with grid being out of order in some situations. This also fixes the visual bug of having the selection background visible on a grid item you did not select.

Regarding statistics, here's what day 1 looks like!

According to the stats, most users play the game either as a guest or signed out of Newgrounds. We're working to track how many users are signed in to NG but do not authorize the game through Passport and this stat will most likely appear in the future.

In terms of play, we're happy to see over 600 trivia sessions across the 370+ players! We expect this to steadily decrease over the next week to some lower but consistent number. Shoutout to the person who chose to navigate to the source of a question - we're happy to see this feature used even if it was just once!

As the weekend progresses, expect an additional update to the Asia trivia pack to bump the total question count to at least 50. After this, we will plan to start work on the next trivia collection and build out a roadmap for Trivial plans to lead us into the fall and winter seasons. There's also a new type of Trivial game we're working on and hope to share details about soon!

Thanks for reading!

k

We've decided the next game will be releasing this Friday! Instead of releasing new trivia with no feature or major QoL improvements this weekend, we've decided to take some extra time to introduce additional content and fix some outstanding bugs.

Currently, three trivia packs have been made with 50 questions each. The aim is to release with 5+ packs monthly so this will give us additional time to guarantee 250+ questions for this next collection.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you look forward to the release this Friday!

Here's a sneak peek at one of those QoL features...

Glad you asked! I'm back in action and have spun up proper support for images in the Trivial Trivia game. We'll be moving forward with flags from around the world as the collection. See a sneak peek below:

This update will also introduce a few QOL features, including...

• Question timer now gives you 25 seconds to guess. Max points per question calculations are unchanged (eg. 10s remaining = 4pts max)
• Implemented support for mousewheel on certain screens
• Improved animations on both title and quiz screens
• Overhauled trivia pack generation... again. Trivia packs now support a difficulty rating out of 5
• Trivia packs now properly support images and on-image attribution if needed

Other QOL and fixes not outlined above have also been made but this is meant to be a quick update! More info on this game and release will come soon, along with a proper update on things.

Thanks for reading!

Hi guys, it's appless. While Kabobble is still recovering from illness earlier this month, I wanted to give a quick update on where we're at and mention some cool ideas we got going on. These ideas will be formatted in a roadmap sometime in the future so keep an eye out for that too

1. New Trivia Collection coming maybe September 1

We've been aiming to release trivia packs the first weekend of every month, but September is a lil odd. The new collection will either go out Sept 1 or the Saturday after, we'll see!

You may be wondering - what's in the new collection? Well, that's a good question! More info will be coming soon, but you can bet it'll either be a cohesive collection with similar ideas, or a grab bag in my desperate attempt to make 6 good packs. If it's a grab bag, expect IRL country-related trivia + some gaming trivia. The collection should have a total of 300 or so questions so we good there.

2. New QOL features for the game

Quality of life features don't really exist for the game yet IMO, mainly because it's a short-lived series of games. We're chatting about what quality features we can add, and I'll share a few ideas we've settled on so far:

• Revamp title screen to remove cluttered buttons
• Make more animations and prettify them
• Add a 'collection' percentage & 'best score' indicator visible on the trivia pack grid display. You'll easily be able to see what you've been good at and what you still need to do!
• More info/help pages

there's of course other ideas but the above is what we're ready to commit to in the next month or two. A proper roadmap will be released mid next month outlining this stuff and more too.

I'll also be enhancing the audio loops for the game to make them longer and less repetitive. I'll also be making some prettier images for the UI and stuff (trivial token icon & the static placeholder for packs got this refresh already).

3. New gamemode / trivia spinoff

So we got this idea for a new way to play trivia in these collections... but it's gonna be a lot of work from what I hear. The first iteration of this gamemode will premiere in Q4 of this year and we hope to enhance it further down the road.

The current plan is to release this new mode as a seperate NG entry and integrate it into the monthly collection releases later, mainly because it's gonna require a lot of rewriting of how stuff works in the background. I'm not the one to write the technical info for this, so we'll see what Kabobble has to say when we release the roadmap next month.

4. Appless' idea

Speaking of the future, I have a neat idea for one of our monthly releases that will require some additional work and collaboration. This idea probably won't be out this year (tl;dr integrating this idea will require programming a completely different way to compile & spit out questions) but if we can pull it off you'll be looking at a neat community-driven collection with lots of questions, most of which are dumbly difficult.

Anyways, here's the rundown of the info above, TLDR:

• New release early September
• Roadmap of new features arriving mid-next month
• QOL is something we're lookin at
• I got a cool idea for the far future

feel free to DM or leave a message hear if you like to chat

Quick and short update:

• When clicking on a trivia pack, you'll now see a little box around the grid icon to show you what's selected.
• trivia token icon changed to a more traditional token look
• Static screen pre-selection optimized
• small fixes with processing screen transitions
• small keybinding modifications

small but cool changes for you. no new trivia additions this time - it's been a hectic month so far!

Thanks for reading!

The next game will be released within the next 48 hours!

How do Trivial Trivia packs get created? Up until last night, the answer to that question may've surprised you!

TLDR: Trivia is now made into a CSV which is converted to valid JSON versus manually typing entries to a JSON file.

The Old Process

Creating trivia packs used to be a very manual and technical feat - find questions, jot down a few key bits of information (statement, answer, related incorrect answers, source, etc.) and add them manually to an ever-increasing JSON file. While utilizing a GUI editor made things easier (JSONBuddy for those curious) manipulating these JSON files with TT:NG, it's becoming moreso cumbersome to use as we kept developing new packs. This editor does not feature a great way to view all of my question statements, spellcheck, or even easily find duplicate questions when they do inevitably happen. I was finding phrasing and quality of some statements to be lacking and the only fix being to navigate through a 500-600 line file to manually spellcheck and re-word questions. Surely there is a better way!

Which leads me to...

The New Process

So what's the solution?

Use Excel. Microsoft Excel is great for a few reasons - you have spellcheck, an easy to use grid layout, and many, many formats to export with. One in particular is of use here - the CSV format! As of last night, I have coded a new web tool to convert a well-formed CSV list into compatible JSON! Each row in this formatted CSV will be converted into valid data I can copy over to my JSON GUI editor. This makes the process of adding (or editing) questions quicker, easier, and ensures higher quality of the content.

This allows the team to also focus more on finding fun questions instead of getting those questions added through a cumbersome process. For example - the t0 question trivia pack you see above was completed in 3 hours. Normally, 50 questions would be a multi-night ordeal between adding the questions, verifying the content, and spellchecking it all.

Since I am personally pretty happy about this new process, I've even made a video showing off the journey of starting at the Excel file and ending it with playing the pack in-game! I hope you all look forward to playing the packs in early August!

It's time to announce the trivia packs for the next TT game!

The next game releasing in early August will focus on video game consoles and history. This game pack will also introduce a new type of trivia - the 'Odd One Out' theme! You'll need to use your knowledge on gaming consoles to figure out which of the four listed don't match up with the question!

In addition to the theme announcement, I'm including our current in-dev list of new features below:

New additions:

• Trivia questions will now display a 'tip' after answering it. There can be a different tip for correct and incorrect answers.
• Added trivia pack skins - trivia pack files can now reference a theme use instead of the default 'trivia_noire' theme
• Added trivia skin scripts - 'skins' can now make the trivia session behave differently.
• Added a timer sound to the last 5 seconds for the trivia timer. Pressure is on!
• New token economy. trivial tokens are a thing. Earn them from scoring well (score/5, max 15/session) on trivia! Use them (cost 3) to mark an answer during a trivia pack correct! This was a last-minute addition (no real plans for it) so feedback will be more than welcome.

Many other small changes/additions have been added as well, but that list will give you a starting point for expectations!

Thanks for reading!