In early 2022, all of our energy was going into preparing for the London Games Festival in April. We hadn’t made it into the official selection, but we weren’t really expecting to because the game was in such an early stage of development. However, attending the festival meant that we would have access to the Games Finance Market where we could pitch the game to publishers and investors. The two most important things we needed for this were a demo and a pitch deck. I left the pitch deck in Michael’s capable hands and set to work on the demo.

Nate had already done a fantastic job programming the server, the quiz rounds and everything else necessary to get the MVP to a playable state, but I felt that the art was severely lacking, primarily because it consisted of static images of the characters that I had drawn using my limited skills. In the final game I wanted fully animated characters against detailed backgrounds, as if the players were watching an interactive cartoon, but that was well beyond what I thought I could achieve on my own. In mid-2021 we had got a handful of artists to do some redesigns and animation tests for a couple of the characters and, although most of what they produced was good, none of it was enough to convince us to hire any of them. It’s hard to say exactly why, but none of them ‘got’ what I was aiming for with the art style. I think they each put too much of an individual spin on it instead of staying true to my concepts and improving the overall quality. But anyway, the situation at the start of 2022 was that we needed the visuals in the demo to reflect what we wanted for the finished game, all without spending a single penny. The simplest and cheapest solution was to do it myself, so I learned how to rig and animate 2D characters in Unity with the help of a few YouTube videos and animated the two characters we needed for the demo: Quizimojo, the Grand High Quizard, and Sir Answerlot, the drunken knight. I was pretty pleased with what I produced and I thought it would be enough to convince publishers and investors of what we were aiming for with the visuals, even if the quality of the art and animation itself wasn’t of a professional standard.

At the festival, we had a great time networking with other devs and industry people, attending talks which gave us valuable insight into the landscape of the gaming industry post-pandemic, and meeting with publishers, investors and potential collaborators. We spoke to people from Barclays, Microsoft, Amazon, LEGO and Team17, to name a few of the big hitters, and the impression that we got from everyone we met and who played the demo was that Quiz Quest was definitely worth pursuing. The most constructive feedback we got came from Simon Smith of Team17. The meeting was brutal at the time - he really tore into the concepts and the mechanics - but everything he said came from a place of wanting the game to be as good as it could be. Nor did he spoon-feed us the solutions. Yes, we came away from his meeting empty handed in terms of a publisher, but we came away with the knowledge that the game was far from ready and that no publisher was going to touch it until we had given every element of gameplay serious consideration. My naïve assumption was that someone would sweep us under their wing like a guardian angel and mentor us to the finished game, helping us refine the concepts and mechanics as we progressed, but this meeting with Simon showed me that that was simply not the case. It’s not enough to have a great idea for a game; you need to put the work in to make that idea a tangible reality.

My two main takeaways from the meeting with Simon were: 1) that if we really wanted Quiz Quest to be collaborative rather than competitive, we needed to emphasise and incentivise collaboration much more, and 2) that the ‘quiz’ element and the ‘quest’ element needed to be bound together much more closely so that the players always felt like they were working towards their ultimate goal. My solution for problem one was to rewrite Quizimojo’s introduction so that he stressed the importance of collaboration and clearly explained that bonus Quids would be earned if all of the players answered the same question correctly. I also thought that an on-screen notification that the team bonus had been awarded would be a good indicator for the players that their collaboration is paying off.

Problem two required much deeper thought as the solution had the potential to change the game completely. Originally I had just mashed together the two concepts of ‘quiz’ and ‘quest’ thinking that the connection was obvious - players need to quiz in order to progress through the quest - and assuming that the players would naturally try to reach the highest score possible even if they didn’t know how high that score could be. But, as Simon rightly said, that wasn’t enough. He felt the gameplay was too disjointed between the quiz rounds and the quest interactions because there wasn’t a measurable goal towards which the players were working besides reaching the end of the story. My first solution was for Sir Answerlot to set a target Quid score that the players had to reach in order to gain access to the final round in the dragon’s lair. However, this didn’t solve the problem of finding an ultimate goal for the players because, once they reached the final round, they still wouldn’t be sure exactly what they were aiming for besides defeating the dragon. The solution I finally hit upon was to set a target Quid score for the whole quest and to have Quizimojo explain at the start (and give reminders throughout) that the players need to reach this total over the course of their quest in order to achieve the rank of Master Quizards. Now the players would always have their target Quid score in mind throughout the quest and would view each quiz round as an opportunity to work towards that target.

After the London Games Festival, we had a few more exciting events lined up in 2022, so I set to work incorporating these improvements into the demo…