Stories Behind the Apps

Tell us about Quiztador!  We all love games that both teach you new stuff but also lets you challenge your friends in a fun and constructive way. For us Quiztador started in the summer of 2013 when we were playing different trivia games and thought it would be more fun to do our own.

How is your app different from similar games? Quiztador is a multiplayer trivia game where players compete by answering questions in a wide range of categories. The first four rounds they will build up their time, and then try to be the last person left as that time ticks away. We think something that stands out is the ability to play 4 people in a game and the fact that we’ve tried to incorporate some of the best elements from various game shows, such as an option to use a number of tactics when you get a difficult question. For instance, you can copy an opponents answer or use 50:50 to eliminate two wrong answers. We also think our business model is a bit different, it’s a free to play game where everything in the game can be unlocked with the single in game currency Gold, which you will earn quite generous amounts of just by completing games (winners get more). Gold can of course also be bought as an in app purchase, which at the same time removes adverts. We’re hoping it’s a model our users will like, as we ourselves don’t like games where you feel forced to spend money to get anywhere.

What went into the design and UI? When designing the user interface we wanted to get the best from the best quiz apps out there and make it better, add a lot of more features and a more actionpacked gameview. All of this covered in a Conquistador age cartoony yet sophisticated theme. The backgrounds and UI elements were all made in photoshop with vector graphics. We have also been inspired by artists such as Steve Purcell (know for Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island games).

What tools or resources did you use in building the app? An interesting aspect of Quiztador compared to many other games out there is that it isn’t developed in Cocos2D or a 3D engine, instead it is developed entirely in XCode with the standard UIKit. We’ve used a lot of wonderful open source libraries, such as AFNetworking and DrupaliOSsdk for connecting with the Drupal based backend, and Facebook’s POP framework for a lot of the animations. StackOverflow is a great resource in finding answers to specific problems that arise during development.

What lessons did you learn creating the game?  One lesson is that there are a lot of fantastic open source libraries available for developers, and a lot of helpful people behind them.

What went right and wrong with the release? Nothing major have gone wrong so far, but I think a lot of people might underestimate the importance of marketing after the release. We haven’t had a lot of downloads yet, partly because we have been waiting to start marketing the app until we could release version 1.1, which polishes up the things we weren’t satisfied with ourselves. We also wanted to start out with some caution since the only thing that we’re a bit unsure about is how the servers will perform with a lot of users.