Hello there! I’m Joe Newton the creator of Quiz Quest, a co-operative quiz party game with a choose-your-own-adventure story played through a desktop screen and smartphones. 2-6 players must work together to achieve a high enough score to become Master Quizards. To do this they must progress through a light-hearted fantasy story in which each interactive encounter develops into a quiz round of some sort.

I thought it was about time I started a devlog, so you can all hear about our development journey. A little disclaimer: I am not very technically minded, so this devlog won’t contain the nitty-gritty details of coding etc., but I will talk about as much as I can from all aspects of the development process. I’ll start by telling the story of the game’s development up until the present day and then move on to updates about new developments as they happen.

By the way, Quiz Quest has a Steam page so, if you haven’t already, take a look, wishlist the game and play the demo! The demo is due a major update soon, so watch out for that. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2276840/Quiz_Quest/

On with the devlog…

This is my first professional venture into the world of game dev, and I may be biting off a bit more than I can chew with Quiz Quest. My only previous experience was writing the music for a game project at uni. I’m an actor and composer by trade, and I also dabble in writing now and again. As an actor, I have collaborated on several projects, including three indie feature films - Lah Di Dah (2022), Dogwood (2021) and DON’T. STOP. RUNNING. (2019) - the web series Popeye’s Island Adventures (2018-2019) and the award-winning Captain Morgan comedy shows by TapTap Theatre (2013-2016). As a composer, I wrote the soundtrack for a Star Wars fan film, Dawn of Resistance (2016), and my library music has been used on the BBC, Channel 5 and several overseas productions. As a writer, in 2018 I penned a dark stage adaptation of The Jungle Book for which I also composed and performed the music, assisted with the direction and design, and played the character of Bagheera.

So far on Quiz Quest I have been responsible for everything creative: story, script, design, music, sound and voiceover. I have also been integral to the technical development of the game, as most of the concepts for quiz rounds and game mechanics have come from me, and I have been heavily involved in building the game itself in Unity using the coding framework put in place by our original developer.

I came up with the concept for Quiz Quest during the first lockdown of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The film and theatre projects that I was set to work on were cancelled or postponed, and whilst on furlough for my day job as a support worker I needed a creative project to occupy my mind. To stave off boredom and to stay connected with friends, Michael Page (co-founder of Quiztal Games) and I started doing video call quizzes with our friendship group’s quiz team, The Pheasant Pluckers. I got tired of Michael always winning, so I decided to shake up the usual competitive model with a collaborative quiz where everyone had to work together. I also used this as an opportunity to flex my creative muscles by structuring the quiz around a bizarre story featuring a neon Jack-in-the-box, a defrosted caveman, a spelling beast and a mastermind villain. I bodged together some very simple art for the characters and made a rudimentary scoring system in Excel. For the quiz rounds I used questions from the board games Trivial Pursuit and Linkee, I found a load of tricky words for the spelling beast’s round and I wrote some questions myself for the mastermind’s round based on my friends’ specialist subjects. Michael loved it and immediately saw the format’s potential for use in online corporate team-building, as remote working was becoming so prevalent at the time.

So, with Michael investigating the business side of things, I got to work writing a proper script…