Well, 11 so far this morning. :) Just FYI if you thought some testing flag was keeping emails from being sent.

i am considering paying India to play the game at launch so that the game rooms are always stuffed with people. That might kickstart it enough to grow a regular player base.

The UP key problem … are you saying that if you type five things and hit the UP arrow key, it’ll show thing #3 (instead of thing #4)?

It should show thing #4 – the last line that you hit the ENTER key to submit.

I agree that gauging question difficulty is far from an easy task. I’ve been writing questions for quiz bowl tournaments for a number of years. One of the two major question types, the “bonus” question, is usually a three-part question with one easy part, one medium part, and one hard part (spoiler alert: that’s where my suggestion had its genesis). It takes a lot of time, effort, and skill to ensure a consistent bonus difficulty across an entire question set.

There are a few ways to gauge difficulty, such as seeing how many hits a Google search returns or looking at category-specific lists (i.e. box office receipts). But you’re right… if one doesn’t know the subject matter, it’s going to be hard to make a good judgment call. For instance: let’s say there are two films (Film A and Film B) released the same year. Film A makes $30 million. Film B makes $2.5 million. Does that mean that Film A is more culturally relevant than Film B? What if I said that Film A was the critically-panned Sly Stallone film Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Film B was Reservoir Dogs? Oops… :)

Ryan, Jeff, I can’t wait to see what you do with the site integration!

I’m not so keen on using MochiAds either, but for a different reason — I don’t like the lack of control over what something I’ve created is selling. I can see that ads feel natural here, though. Phil mentioned a game show, so a commercial break is a fine analogy :)

What made me think it was perhaps too frequent was my own experience. I jumped into the middle of a round, a little confused about what was going on, happened to get a bunch of questions I didn’t know the answers to (or was too slow — I think I ended the round on zero points!), and if I’d been asked to stop and watch an ad for 10-15 seconds before continuing, I’d probably have quit. After playing for longer, though, I got more into it, so I don’t think I would have minded an ad break so much.

iSketch enforces a little break between rounds where everyone gets to relax and say “good game” and so on, and it really adds something, so I do agree with you on splitting the game into chunks.

Micro-transactions… I dunno. I really like the idea, but it might just be the technology side of it that fascinates me. It’s easy to imagine that *other* players will be happy to spend 50c for some item in a game, but I’ve rarely done it myself. I’d like to see MTs used as a way to buy extras for a game that’s already complete, like paying a bit more for the Special Edition of a DVD, so that’s probably how I’ll use it, if at all. I’m not so keen on “pay $1 to unlock level 5″; that feels like shareware rather than micro-transactions, and I don’t think people are ready to accept browser-based Flash games as shareware right now.

You make a good point comparing it to Rock Band, because I guess the “obvious” way to use MTs would be to make “80s Music” a purchasable trivia category. It would suck if everyone that wanted to play that round had to buy it. It would be particularly irritating to new players if their friends only ever played in the premium rooms.

I hadn’t considered MTs becoming the new preloader ads. In that case it WOULD be nice to see some games without them!

- Ryan

Grading the albums by difficulty is … difficult. Takes a lot more research. i know 70′s music, but i’m totally clueless with country. Who am i to say what an easy, medium and hard country album is? Anyway, we’re taking everyone’s considerations about difficulty under careful consideration. Thanks for that feedback.

And you’re the first one to mention IRC! Definitely our inspiration :)

- Ryan

Even though there are 500 music questions, I ran into dupes a couple of times in an hour of playing. You’re gonna need a TON of questions… but if the ad revenues are coming in, writing new questions shouldn’t be so bad.

Other thoughts:

- Allow a little more time to pass between clues in order to give players more time to think of (and type) the answer before the next clue.

- Answer choices seem like they are pulled from a list in random order. This could be a problem. If the answer was Michael Jackson, you’d want Off the Wall to come up before Thriller because a lot more people know the latter than the former. To fix this, group the clues for each question into easy, medium, and hard categories. Pull a random choice from the hard clues and show it first. Repeat for medium and then easy.

i’m not a big MochiAds fan, true. It’s not really their problem – it’s more that i’m not a fan of the free-to-play model in general. But maybe i was approaching it all wrong? We’re building ICT strictly with distribution in mind. Ads are literally an afterthought.

You’re right – maybe an ad every round will be too frequent? i like that it would break gamesup into discernable chunks. We’ll try it on and see how it feels.

Maybe i have the wrong mindset about micro-transactions, too? To my mind, you have to have the right kind of game to support them, and that type of game is usually a larger endeavour than we’re used to. i’d rather sell vanity items (hats and jackets), for example, than gameplay-essential items. i don’t like it when players can’t play together because one person has paid and the other hasn’t, as with Rock Band or Crackdown. i also feel that players are going to be swamped with microtransactions by this time next year. It might be nice to NOT offer them. Anyway, i worry we’re too late to the plate. By the time we build a game to support them, players will be nickeled and dimed to death.

Are you delving into microtransactions MJW? What’s your plan?

I didn’t realise at first that my untoldentertainment.com account was the same as my forum login; it’s neat the way you linked them like that.

Well, *I* certainly wouldn’t mind it if I could get rid of the adverts just by logging in ;) I take your point about shooting yourself in the foot. I guess it depends whether you’d rather focus on getting people signed up to your site, or on ad revenue… and I know you’re not the kind to sing of the wonders of MochiAds. To be honest, I’m surprised you’re going for a 10-15 second ad break between every round, that sounds pretty frequent to me. Unless you could keep chatting during them, I guess.

Actually, I wanted to ask you something. Since micro-transactions seem to be the flavour-of-the-month, with both FGL and Mochi releasing their systems, have you considered doing something with those?

It might be too tricky to moo when two players “scoop” each other, but the plan is that when one player dethrones the player who holds the streak, there’s some moo action. And the player with the streak gets an upside-down crown-like udder next to his name.

Even though there’s no real perk yet for logging in with your Untold Entertainment login/password, we’ve seen a modest boost in our membership. Today, we’re working on displaying your message board avatar in the game. MJW – i think you’re one of the only members who has one!

More membership-related features are on their way. i’m even toying with the idea of removing ads for people who log in as members (once ads are actually implemented.) What do you think of that? Would that be us shooting ourselves in the foot?

I”ll be interested to see how this plays with a full room. Oh, one thing I wondered about: the two of us kept “scooping” each other, posting the correct answer just after the other did. Based on the name, I assumed this would be recognised somehow, perhaps with a moo. Is that going to happen, or am I speculating? :)

But there’s a design problem. ICT is a multiplayer game. If you say you want an easy game, that’s fine for you, but you may be jumping into a room with 9 other ppl in it (one can hope). What if all 9 ppl want difficult questions?

A few people have commented on the fact that they think some of the q’s are too challenging. i’d suggest that’s just the nature of trivia. You know some, you don’t know some. And it’s not until you get other people playing with you that a question seems less difficult. Let’s say there’s a question you’d never get on your own, but you’re playing with other people and two other people guess it correctly at the same time. Is it still a difficult question? No. You just chalk it up to the fact that YOU didn’t know the answer at that point. It only SEEMS more difficult when you’re playing alone. My bet is that people who say the game is too challenging were playing solo.

The difficulty ranking might come in handy with the Challenge Mode we’re planning. That’s where you enter a friend’s email address, and then you answer 10 questions. The game gives you a score, and sends an email to your friend asking him to answer the same 10 questions. Then you compare scores, and one person is the awesomest. That’s where i could see you wanting to choose a difficulty mode.

- Ryan

This way you can dynamically create difficulty modes or ramp up the difficulty of questions. I’d like to be given a few easy questions to hook me and get me warmed up before I get into the more difficult questions.

You can see the chat transcript by rolling over the button in the bottom left corner, next to the input field. This is probably just an art problem? A better icon might make it more obvious.

Some way to access old guesses is required, if you ‘know’ the answer but is missing the last S you just wanna punch somebody.

That’s it for me.

I kind of see it like this: On the one hand you could present a very flashy audio/visual feedback-rich environment where the player feels constantly stimulated or a more relaxed, I’m-with-friends-playing-trivia setting where it’s pretty calm and all about flexing your brain…

You know those silly machines they stick in bars? Folks belly-up and stick bills in them hour after hour? If you watch one some time, they’re not all that bad to look at. You can see the appeal. Even though you may not get them all correct, you’re still visually and aurally stimulated for getting even a single question right.

Pretty powerful stuff. Add a cow and you could possibly melt minds. ;)

We have a visual style we’re planning, and it’s unique to this genre. The game won’t look like a game show – too typical. This is Interrupting Cow Trivia, after all.

Are you planning on heading toward a game show style or more of a table-top setting? I think the former could really be that intangible “thing” that keeps people glued.

Kudos!

- Ryan