Creating a Quiz Game

a Quizzical Issue

Let me tell you about an exciting project I did last year! At the time, I had some part-time work creating “quiz games” for a local rest home. The questions were all written up in a Powerpoint document, and they looked a bit like this:

Q.) Which U.S. state has the motto: “Friendship”?
a.) Oregon
b.) Minnesota
c.) Texas
d.) Mississippi

Did you get it? Answers at the end of the article!

While creating Powerpoint quizzes was fun at first, I soon found coming up with new questions every week was getting tedious. So, I came up with a fun idea – why not turn these quiz games into a dynamic and replayable video game using the Unity Engine?

If you’re not familiar, Unity is a free tool that lets you create your own video games. And as luck would have it, the Unity course I was self-studying had a lesson on creating a simple quiz game. With a little code and creativity, I was able to create Quizmaster – the ultimate quiz game!

Now, instead of spending hours every week writing new questions, Quizmaster selects them randomly from a large pool of questions to create an infinite variety of unique quiz sessions. And the best part? It’s not just a boring slideshow anymore – the quiz game has sound and visual effects, making it much more engaging for the residents.

This project has been so much fun and incredibly rewarding. I love that I was able to take something that was once tedious and turn it into something dynamic and engaging. And who knows, maybe one day my little quiz game will be played by people all over the world!

Before we go behind-the-scenes of Quizmaster, let’s do another fun quiz question!

Q.) What is a group of pugs called?
a.) a Grumbling
b.) a Whining
c.) a Moan
d.) a Complaint

Creating Quizmaster

The first step of creating Quizmaster was developing the user interface. This was a lot of fun, especially since I consider myself more of an artist than a programmer. Plus, having a nice visual design is a powerful motivator to dive into coding and get things working!

Check out this screenshot of a question on the screen! Behind-the-scenes, you can think of each question as an object with several properties. These properties are things like the question text, the four answer texts, and the identity of the correct answer text.

The game logic pulls the corresponding text for each question and overlays it to its proper position in the graphical interface! Of course, I ran into some issues along the way – like when players could easily cheat by selecting a different answer after getting one wrong! To fix this, I made it so you get kicked to the next question after your initial answer.

The original version of Quizmaster also had a timer feature, where each question had to be answered within a short period of time. But I received some negative feedback over that feature, so I took it out. Unfortunately, I had linked the timer to all kinds of other processes in the game – so removing it immediately broke the entire program! It just goes to show that you should be careful about adding unnecessary features to your projects – things can get out of control very quickly! In any case, it turned out to be a good exercise in troubleshooting and debugging.

After the initial release of Quizmaster, I updated it a bunch over the following weeks. I improved the graphics and readability, added animations that light up the buttons when you answer, and even included sound effects for correct/incorrect answers.

I also got requests from the rest home about specific changes they wanted. For example, they requested the question labels be changed from (a,b,c,d) to (1,2,3,4) – since some residents were hard of hearing, “c” and “d” sounded too similar! Luckily this was a real simple change to implement, and I’m always willing to make adjustments to ensure everyone can enjoy the game.

Here’s another quiz question for you!

Q.) One common phobia is a fear of holes (e.g. in a hornet’s nest). What is this called?
a.) Holeyophobia
b.) Noviophobia
c.) Trypophobia
d.) Forophobia

the End of Quizmaster

Even though I’m no longer working with the rest home, Quizmaster is still going strong in 2023, with weekly games keeping the residents entertained. For a final update, I added 200 new questions – there are now 600 unique questions to keep your brain buzzing!

Are you curious to see how well you’ll do? Give it a shot by clicking on this link! Just a note that it’s best played on a computer, and I can’t really recommend trying it on a phone.

While I don’t have any immediate plans to update Quizmaster more, I’m always happy to add new questions if the rest home folks ask me to. Since the game currently has all the core features I wanted to include, adding new questions is comparatively quick. But who knows? Maybe some new animations or a fresh visual overhaul could be fun in the future.

Now, as much as I loved making Quizmaster, it’s time for me to explore new projects. I’m currently working on an online art gallery and a top-secret endeavour that I’ll be sharing with you in my upcoming article. So stay tuned for that! And thank you so much for checking out my first blog post. I promise there’s more exciting content on the horizon!

Quiz Answers

Which U.S. state has the motto: “Friendship”?
Texas

What is a group of pugs called?
a Grumbling

One common phobia is a fear of holes (e.g. in a hornet’s nest). What is this called?
Trypophobia