Monday 21 March 2016

Game Show Adventure Quiz & Puzzle game

What is Game Show Adventure?

Game Show Banner
Created by Quiz Pub UK 2016

Concept

At Quiz Pub UK I have amassed a considerable amount of fun trivia, fun facts, puzzles and so on that I create weekly to put into my quiz packs for pubs to download. The website ticks over but doesn't make much money, not enough for the amount of work I put into research and writing the quizzes, each quiz takes me 2 or 3 days to create.

So, I thought it would be a good idea to create a quiz game that I could put all my trivia into. It took about 3 months to learn the basics of Lua which is the language of Android. Several more months to learn Corona SDK and create the basics of the game and type out thousands of questions, plus I had to create four possible answers for each one, it was a mammoth task.

Game Show Screen Shot 1
The Question Round - Knowledge

Knowledge

This took about 3000 hours working day and night, it was so monotonous and took a lot of concentration. Every question was hand picked and sorted into easy, medium and hard. Then each answer was checked to see if it was accurate. I purposely only chose questions that any native English speaking person in the world would have a chance of answering, not an easy task.

The Pyramid

Screen shot of Aztec Pyramid
The Aztec Pyramid
I decided early on that I wanted the rounds in the game to be displayed as a pyramid that you worked your way to the top to win the game. This made me think of adding a few different games in between the knowledge rounds to mix things up a bit so I went for a word game called Conundrum and a TV game show called Catchphrase. More on those games later. I put a shop at the end of each level for the players to spend what they had earned on buying lives and passes or trying to win them in one of the 9 different gamble games.
I re-drew that pyramid over 20 times over the last 2 years because I kept changing the games! This is the easy pyramid, the Aztec Zone where everything is tropical and so is the music. I then thought of pyramid locations for the medium and hard zones, I could only think of two, Egypt and Las Vegas so I went with those. As you can imagine, I've already started to create a monster project for myself. I have to create everything myself, I can't afford to pay anybody anything I'm just about surviving, just! I'm no artist and I've not really been much of a graphic artist but for the game to be taken seriously I knew I had to put a lot of effort into making the graphics as top notch as I can. In the end I've made over 1200 high definition graphics for Game Show Adventure. I'm quite proud of my frog.
Frog owned by Magical Games
Frog created by Magical Games 2016

Conundrum screen shot
Conundrum word puzzle

 Conundrum

Here's an interesting game, a hard game for many people in fact. What I did was picked a word, any word and mixed up the letters to try and form a new word or a sentence. This method hides the original word very well and is very off putting. Because this game can be so annoying I put clue tokens in the game to give you a clue to what the original word is you're looking for. This took considerable effort on my part creating hundreds of anagrams in easy, medium and hard, not only that but I had to check that you couldn't make another word out of each one too, I'm glad I've done it and been so thorough, it's one game I won't have to add to at a later date.

Catchphrase

Screen shot of catchphrase
Catchphrase puzzle game
I'm just a sucker for punishment, I knew what I was getting myself into, basically I was creating an entire app as only one small part of my overall game. In case you've never seen the TV show Catchphrase, contestants are shown an animated picture that is trying to purvey a well known saying or phrase, song title or product. I started off by reading lots and lots of phrases and picking the ones I could translate in pictures. The best way to work out the word is to start by looking at the blank words, in the screen shot you can see it's made up of two words. Then look at the each blank word to see how long each one is. This will help you when looking at the picture, the first picture is a stage like you would see in a theater. Behind this is a train station. See if you can figure out the phrase before I give you the answer.
I did some clever programming in this game. I made the code strip all the spaces out of the phrase, then take out all the repeat letters, then add random letters to make up 10 and display them at the bottom of the screen for the players to tap, like a small keyboard, that you use to fill in the blank tiles in the middle of the screen.
The catchphrase in the picture is Play Station.


For your enjoyment here are two of the catchphrases taken straight from the game, I've made 100 of these so far and soon I'll be adding a hundred more. 

 Deal or No Deal

I've called this game Open the Box to avoid any copyright issues with the TV game show Deal or No Deal. I've also gone to the trouble to make the boxes different and the amount of them too. This game is at the very top of the pyramid so when you get here you can relax. I spent a lot of time on the graphics in this game as you can see in the screen shot. If you've never seen this game on the TV then it's a simple case of choosing a box for yourself, then proceeding to open the others and getting offers for your box each time. Can you win the million? If you do you get a trophy to add to your trophy room. At this point my game has a definite theme, game shows hence the name Game show Adventure!

I've only scratched the surface so far! I've created other types of puzzles and arcade style games far too many to mention in this already very long blog page. If you are really interested in learning more about this game then visit the website here Game Show Quiz and Puzzle Game.

If you have an Android tablet or phone then you can try the first pyramid in my game for free and if you like it you can unlock the other two pyramids for a very small price.

The Android Game

You can download the full Android game here Game Show
  • Multiplayer - 1 to 4 players.
  • 1200+ High Definition graphics.
  • Nearly 100 Sound effects and backing tracks.
  • Hundreds of puzzle games.
  • Thousands of quiz questions covering every topic.
  • Mazes, word searches, spot the difference and more!
  • Classic arcade games like Frogger™ and Pac-Man™
  • Classic board games like Connect Four™ and Simon™
  • Gamble games like British slots and Roulette.
  • TV Game Shows like Deal or No Deal™, Catchphrase™ and more!
For an in depth tutorial on how to master this massive Game Show Adventure then tap this Best Android Quiz App 2016
Game Show Adventure Banner Bottom