Following our positive experience at the London Games Festival 2022, the next event to prepare for was the UKIE Festival of Play. This festival is geared towards school children, with a focus on educational games and careers in the gaming industry. Quiz Quest has definite potential as an educational game because of its focus on collaboration and because quizzes themselves are both a test of people’s knowledge and an opportunity for them to learn something new. The two major changes we made to the demo for the Festival of Play - in addition to the general improvements - were to buy in a database of age-appropriate educational questions and to add subtitles. Unfortunately, Nate was too busy to write the code that would control the subtitles, so I had to find a solution myself that wouldn’t require any coding. The rather inelegant solution that I came up with was to create image files for each subtitle and to activate them using triggers in FMOD and PlayMaker. It took a while to implement, but at least it worked! Michael and I had a really fun time at the festival. It was so encouraging to see the kids engaging with the game and working together to answer the questions. We also received positive feedback from the educators, who could see the potential of Quiz Quest as a learning tool.
Later the same month we went along to Develop:Brighton, where we met with more potential publishers, received even more positivity towards the game, but ultimately came away empty handed. Michael was convinced that the problems lay in our business model, budget and pitch deck, so he threw himself into getting those perfected, enlisting my help when needed to find the partner studios to whom we planned to outsource development, art and audio. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to build the prototype of the full game so I could see where improvements in the script and music needed to be made, and so we could have something that was as close to my vision for the final game as possible. Nate fixed a few of the major bugs in the server and devised a different way to present the subtitles, overhauling my clumsy solution. At the end of the year I conducted a few playtests of the prototype with friends and family from which I learned a great deal, primarily that Quiz Quest is the perfect game for a lazy post-Christmas afternoon!
2023 got off to a good start when we were fortunate enough to exhibit at the Guildford Games Festival. In preparation for that, Michael had begun posting on social media to generate interest for the event and to spread the word that Quiz Quest was coming soon. Meanwhile, I had completely revamped the demo after deciding to swap Sir Answerlot’s level with Robin Yewblind’s level, which throws the players directly into the action from the off. We had also decided to get Quiz Quest on Steam, as this would allow us to link publishers to our latest build, upload a demo that everyone with access to Steam can play, and allow Steam users to show their interest in the game by adding it to their wishlists. Setting up a Steam page proved to be a relatively simple process. If Michael and I can manage it ourselves, then anyone can!
On the day of the Guildford Games Festival, we again got a lovely response from everyone who was able to find our exhibition stand, and we also had a valuable chat about pitching with Oscar Clark of Fundamentally Games. The Fundamentally Games website is a fantastic resource for early stage game devs, with access to articles and webinars, an extensive list of financiers and publishers, and a template for creating a killer pitch deck. If you haven’t already, I suggest you check it out. https://www.fundamentally.games/
Then, a few days after the festival, we received some disappointing news…