Andy Eades Gets Us Amped for Quiz Climber
Relentless Software, the makers of the Buzz! franchise, partner with Chillingo, the publisher of Angry Birds, to bring us Quiz Climber.
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By Sal Basile June 2, 2011 |
| 6 | A Contract Within 24 Hours |
Sal Basile: You've just partnered with Chillingo. When EA first bought them, there was a little confusion about the deal and people were a little uneasy about it all. Did that affect your decision to partner with them in anyway?
Andy Eades: Not at all. Actually, we know EA really well, and coming from a digital console space like we have done, we wouldn’t have known the right number to pick up and call or the principle of doing that. We were discussing with EA one day, and we had a prototype of Quiz Climber on our phones, and we said here have a look at this and tell us what you think. The lady we were talking to from EA, said, “I love this game. I want to sign it with Chillingo." The very next day, within 24 hours, I had a contract with Chillingo. It was really useful to us, because it would have taken a bit longer. I actually knew the guys at Chillingo much better than I knew the guys at EA, because of these circles that we all go in. So it’s been really good for us.
Sal: So they were the first and last people you had to talk to about it?
Andy: Yeah, well we weren’t really pitching because it’s a self-published game. We were just testing out. We were just really in a very early stage, and we were talking to EA about something else at the time. You know, you talk about other things with publicists. And it was just, “well have a look at this. We think it has potential, what do you think?” They thought it was great and the rest is history. That was back in December of last year. I think we signed a distribution deal with Chillingo in the beginning of January.
| 5 | Not Stressing Over Cheaters |
Sal: Is there a time limit? Or is there the possibility that someone will read the question and then Google the answer?
Andy: Yeah, that’s always a question that comes up. If you’re really fast, I guess you could, but there is a little time bar. We don’t want to punish people for being slower readers than us, though. It’s quite forgiving. I guess, if you really wanted to cheat, you could. But it’s the same with anything.
Sal: I’ve given up on Words With Friends because my friends just play with dictionaries next to them.
Andy: Yeah. I think you could, but also I don’t think there’s much point, because you’re only cheating yourself. Unless you’re actually sitting there with Google, you could do a screenshot of each question and then you could get through 3,000 questions eventually I suppose. But that’s part of the reason why every two weeks you have to inject new questions into it, to keep it fresh. The other thing we want people to do is that, when I get to question 15 and it’s about the TV show Friends and I get it wrong, the next time I hit that question, I might remember, and I’ll get it right next time. That gives me a bit of a reward for playing it and I’ve learned something new. Can’t really prevent people from cheating, but if you pause the game and then come back to it, you can never pause it with the question on the screen, for a start. You can only pause it when there’s no question on the screen. The second point is that if you go out of the game and come back a long time later, we can save it rather than quit and you have to start again. So we’ve got some protection, but we’re not stressing too much about it.
| 4 | An Enjoyable Experience, Not a Nagging Experience |
Sal: When you talk about social networking, do you mean Facebook or is it some internal activity within the game?
Andy: It’s pretty simple for this version. We want to keep it as simple as possible. Essentially, as you jump up the tree, each branch represents the level you get to. So if you get to branch 10, then you will be represented in everyone else's game as a critter we call a Quizzle sitting on that branch. There’s a leaderboard, so you can scan the leaderboard to see where everyone is. So the whole point of the game is beating your friends and getting higher scores than them, that’s it. We do some in-game messaging between my game and your game. So if you beat me, all you have to do is poke my Quizzle, and that sends a message to me that I’ve been beaten. It’s very gentle. In that case, it’s through the actual game, so it’s not nagging or spamming. We’re being really careful not to fall in to the same trap as other games. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable experience, not a nagging experience.
Sal: If you have it linked to your Facebook, how does that work?
Andy: It really only uses the Facebook stuff so that it knows who your friends are. So it shows the names, that’s all you really use it for. And then we hold everyone’s high score in our database. So if I’m at branch 16, and you get to branch 17, then you’ll get to send me a message through the game.
