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