Today we’ll talk a bit about one of the later tasks during the making of Quiz Game Land, which was both entertaining and laborious: taking pictures.

In the 1.4 version of Quiz Game Land we introduced what we called “visual questions”, which consist in displaying a picture and asking the player about it. With this, we intended  to add a little bit more of variety to the battles of questions, since one could get tired of so much text. An example is shown below.

The idea was nice, so we started to think about the type of questions which could take advantage of having a picture. Identifying pieces of hardware was a no-brainer, so we took out all of our gaming stuff and shot around 150 pictures during a couple of days. It was kind of fun going through all of the consoles, controllers, cartridges and games, but it also was a bit of a mess dealing with all the cables, boxes and plastics and getting them in their place again when we were finished.

Here there are a few pictures of the first day of photo shooting (with some fancy colours),while  preparing the consoles to be nicely captured for the game.

Gathered boxed hardware for the shooting.

Ready to go, Nintendo handhelds on the front.

Wouldn’t the VB be cooler in this colour? Maybe not…

Can you recognize all of them? Sure you can!

After taking pictures of the consoles, we went on with the games, controllers etc. The arcade hardware (none is shown here) was a bit tricky to shoot, due to its large size and the small size of the picture to be displayed in the game, but in the end all was nicely included. After that, we went over all the pictures, selected the best looking ones and edited them in order to remove all kind of logos, text and images (such as cart labels) which could easily give away the answer to the question.

In the end the result was good and, together with the silhouette guessing questions and a few miscellaneous ones, we managed to introduce around 250 visual questions in the game. The only downside of the update was to surpass 10MB in size, due to the weight of the pictures, which is the limit to download the game via 3G network.

by David | Posted in Post-Mortem, Quiz Game Land