Dear Lab Cats

Browser-based games are mostly straight-forward, but when you’re playing a party game, things become more difficult. As you play with one joint big screen and your own smartphones as remotes, there’s a few steps required to connect everything together. We will now explain all this in a few steps, or you can dive right in at QuizWitz.com!.

The first step is the start of course. You click ‘play’ and decide whether you want to play against friends, or on your own. The single player mode will be upgraded in the future!

The next few steps are there to connect your phone to the party game itself. enter the link in your browser and then enter the code on the main screen. Afterwards you just press ‘Join’ and wait for everyone to join. When you next press start, the game will start!

It’s as easy as that! See the full image below.

Now start playing QuizWitz at QuizWitz.com and let us know what you think in the whiskers box below, or leave us a post on our Facebook or Twitter account!

And remember; don’t forget to hug the cat!

Dear lab cats

How are y’all purring? We’ve been quiet for a little while, but there’s only good news! Development is going great and we had a blast at Made In Asia 2015! Here’s what’s happening.

QuizWitz and the world

Here’s a little visualization of the platform and the party game together! People (cats in this case) play the game together with friends through their online profile. Their profile registers their performance and the player rises in the rankings, while their expertise in the played categories grows.

Cartoon Movie & Made In Asia

The past few weeks we’ve been working our fur off! First, I went to the Cartoon Games and Cartoon Movie event in Lyon! It was a huge networking event where about 750 people were watching pitches, having meetings and some French wine. It was all very intimidating at first but I had a blast and made lots of new buddies.

Last weekend we were at Made In Asia in Brussels, a massive convention for geeks. It required a lot of preparation, but it was all worth it. Lots of people came to play the game and answered questions about Asia all weekend long! You can play them here, but I must warn you: the quiz is tough, but you can’t learn from a correct answer, can you?

The Browser Challenge

Even though most people love to play a quiz, the difficulty is to anticipate how players will use our platform. There’s a lot of variables we have to take into account. Right now we’re focused on making the remote views work on every device, which is a tough job. Everyone uses a different browser on a different device, all while being connected to another network.

Of course, every beginning is hard and we feel we can use any help we can get. If you have any doubts or insights you’d like to share with us, leave them in the whiskers box below, or find us on Facebook!

Dear Lab Cats!

Another week has passed and we have some more information for you. As we’re creating a new platform, we have to think about how to approach collecting and organizing questions. It’s a real challenge to make everything straight forward and neat!

Question organization

We know people want to collect as many high quality questions as possible. That’s why we decided to allow people to create them in Rounds of at least 15 questions. These Rounds can be collected in the Library after which they will be added to a user’s personal archive. From there you’ll be able to play them or add them to a Pack.

Packs are collections of Rounds to prepare for the party at hand, or test your friends’ knowledge about a certain topic in different Rounds.

Quizzes are a whole other story. They’re collections of packs, but customizable ones. They can also be embedded into 3rd party websites, which makes them more practical for use outside of QuizWitz. Of course they’ll still be played in the party game environment.

Some technical developments

Thijs and Rui, our programmers, have been working hard on our management platform. We went for an extendable REST API design with a HTML5 frontend. Maybe a bit technical, but it basically means that we will be able to port your data to multiple devices and environments, and perhaps even open up our platform to external developers one day.

We’re aiming to make QuizWitz as cross-platform and as user-friendly as we possibly can. People have to enjoy the time they spend on our platform just as much as playing the party game.

What do you think of our approach? Feel free to share your thoughts and like us on Facebook. And don’t forget to love the cat!