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!

The next Trivial Trivia game will have themes for each of the packs. Here's what one looks like from mobile!

Hello once again!

Been about a week since being here on Newgrounds, and I wanted to post some new information about Trivial Guesser and the next Trivial Trivia game. Keep reading for details!

Trivial Guesser

TG: Video Games has received an update today fixing some not-so-minor issues. This game series will be going on hiatus at the end of this month so the codebase can get some much needed attention and love.

Hidden medal difficulty has also been adjusted. Previously, the hidden medals would be awarded after making 100 guesses (either correct or incorrect) / making 100 correct guesses. This has been adjusted to reduce the requirements and one of these medals should be earnable starting tomorrow.

This update also expanded the maximum days of daily content from 31 to 35 days. This means August 5, 2024 will be the last new daily for the game categories. After this day the game will reset to day 1 and continue to do so every 36 days. After day 35 you will be able to play any day from the previous days menu. Thanks for playing this experimental game and I hope to make something better to follow it up in a few months from now!

Trivial Trivia

The next Trivial Trivia game will closely follow that of the Trivial Guesser game released this month. The game will be named Trivial Trivia: Gaming Console Collection! It will feature 8 trivia packs and I am aiming to have over 40 questions per pack.

This iteration of Trivial Trivia introduces many new features. Without going into too much detail, these features are directly inspired from feedback given by the people here on NG.

I'll plan to release a new blog post soon going into further details and providing names of a trivia pack or two, but for the time being that's it! You can expect to play the next Trivial Trivia game the first weekend of August.

Hello!

The Trivial Guesser game has been out for 8 days now, and well, it's had a rocky start. Some odd issues have continued to pop up which should mostly be resolved as of today. These fixes have resulted in some bigger changes which are outlined below:

Big Changes

- The Previous Day calendar is no longer a supporter-only upgrade. Due to a rocky launch and some updates affecting the quality of the game, this has been made available to ALL Newgrounds users. If you are not signed in to the game, you will need to sign in to view this feature. There are currently 8 days available to play from this page.

- Save Data Fixes - if you've accidentally signed in to a separate browser and lost save data from overriding existing data, DM me. I've got a fix to share with you!

Modifications:

- Modified first-load order when opening game. This hopefully fixes some cloud save & visual issues upon loading the game

- Fixed the on-screen keyboard acting weird

- Fixed issue with NG save data not always loading on time

- Fixed issue with Previous Day view not updating your stats on playing a previous day

- Fixed issue with grid items on title not displaying your completed status even if a day was completed

New Features:

- Added two new buttons in the Stats & Stuff screen. These buttons will display the last time data was saved/loaded from Newgrounds.

- NG Save Data is now only loaded once per game load. This is to prevent data getting out of sync and allowing players to play categories multiple times

- Made the 30 Guesses badge a little easier

Day 2 has started with Trivial Guesser! Here's a quick rundown of what's new, what's updated, and what's coming. But first, have some stats!

(GM0 = Nintendo, GM1 = Microsoft, GM2 = Sony, GM3 = PC)

To the 9 supporters viewing the Previous Days page, you now will see more than just Day 1! To the four clicks to Patreon, thanks for checking that out!

The game left judgement around 6PM EST today at 3.5 stars and has been fairly constant since.

Today's Updates & Additions

Today the game saw some minor updates. Around 10AM the game was updated to fix stats tracking around 'busts', or not guessing the game in 4 attempts. This was incorrectly sending as "GMx_Guess4" which was not being tracked.

The game also saw some small tweaks with styling to better fit fonts and content onto the page.

About 30 minutes ago the game was updated to forcefully use EST/New York timezone as browsers and timezones suck. Despite the game pulling the Datetime from NG's API, your browser parsed the date (which included NG's timezone offset) into your local timezone anyway. The most recent update makes that no longer an issue.

Finally, the Microsoft category has received a few updates and is being prepped for more days. Other categories will receive updates soon to push the maximum day from 31 to 45. If people stick around with the game long enough, I hope to add as many days as necessary!

What's Coming

In addition to more days being added to the categories, fixes and small feature improvements will be added. I'm closely watching stats and will adjust difficulty if needed.

After patching the game this week, the team will begin work on the next Trivial Trivia game and whatever packs will be included with that game. Since the engine itself is built already, building out a new game for the series should take weeks instead of months.

Closing Message

As always, we appreciate the messages, feedback, support, and reviews! These games are made for free and with the aim to make you think or teach you something new in a roundabout way. The Trivial series of games also allow you to discover new information through linking sources or answers too! I think it is a wonderful thing to give players the ability to discover information related to a question or statement they are presented with if they are piqued by it.

Lastly, the Trivial team has launched a Patreon page over the weekend. We're not looking to take your money, but felt this would be a good way to gauge interest in the development and ideas behind the Trivia and Guesser games. While we intend to roll out paid tiers once we know what they should include, we'd more than love for you to give us a follow and check in on our updates from time to time too. You can see the Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/TeamTrivial

Thanks for reading!

Check it out now!

Please check it out, leave a rating, and leave some feedback for the game! It's a brand new concept for us and @applessmillion and myself would love to know what you think!

What is Trivial Guesser?

You have four attempts to guess the daily answer for each category. Each time you guess, you're given a new hint with up to three being available. Can you guess it?

Each day, each category is updated with a new answer and hints. Currently with Trivial Trivia: Video Games, there's 31 days worth of daily content for you to guess away at! Come back each day for a quick and not-so-easy guessing game.

Trivial Guesser was released today, July 1, to give everyone a Day 1 start to the game at the first of the month. We built this with a lifespan of 1 month in mind, but if feedback is good, we'll happily keep it going!

Why Trivial Guesser

Sometimes trivia is fun with multiple choice or true and false. Sometimes it's fun with hints. It's almost never fun with fill-in-the-blank answers. This game makes the attempt at making fill in the blank fun while giving you a few hints to guide you along the way. Much like Worlde, you'll also be shown if your answer has any correct letters in your attempts.

Trivial Guesser is also a nice break from the Trivial Trivia series which will be continuing next month. In an ideal situation, Trivial Trivia and Trivial Guesser will alternate each month to give everyone a break from the other series and give each series time to develop and create cool categories and trivia packs. Development for Trivial Guesser will continue throughout the week and next week to fix any bugs, modify styling as needed, implement quick features, and further develop the daily content if this game is liked.

Please check it out, leave a rating, and leave some feedback for the game!

Coming very soon - Trivial Guesser: Video Games! Here's a sneak peak before the game goes live and I write up a more detailed post. There'll be a few minor visual changes here and there, but the game is ready to go with over 30 days worth of content! Woo!

This game was also not as easy as slapping a new coat of paint on the Trivial Trivia setup - this game features a completely new setup and was programmed mostly from scratch starting in early June. One change you will quickly notice is how smooooooth everything is. Some portions of the Trivial Trivia engine did make it over though, mainly the music handler, global UI setup, and NG API functions; although these were heavily modified. Feel free to peek at previous post updates and previews on the game to see how progress went! I'll also include a "before" and after picture below - showing the first iteration of the concept compared to where the game is now!

(That Newgrounds topic is a wishlist for me currently, need to find a fun way to integrate Newgrounds submissions/users/etc. into this kind of game)

This game also features some great art and music from collaborators - you'll see who soon!

Thanks for reading, and be posting again soon!

For anyone browsing blog posts or one of the two games I'm on, you may notice a new name - It's no longer Kabobble! Since I have plans to continue releasing 'Trivial' games in the future, I figured a rebrand to TeamTrivial would make sense.

Personally, the 'Kabobble' you knew will be stepping back a little to focus on the development side of things whereas applessmillion will help with the communication and collaboration side.

Any future Trivial-series games will be published under me too! applessmillion won't be the author of any future projects but he'll still be on the 'team' for all purposes of the term.

Thanks for reading!

Quick post to say thanks for allowing the game to hit over 30,000 views on Newgrounds in less than a month! This is absolutely amazing and I'm happy to see the game do so well. I never imagined a trivia game to be played and liked so much! Appreciate everyone who has played, rated, commented, and supported the game!

Thank you everyone.