So one of the important parts about the game are what kinds of questions are going to be asked and how will they be organized.
Organizing the Questions
The Trivial Pursuit model has questions broken up into categories based on subject matter, but I wanted to try and do something different. Since there is a programatic element to the game, I thought it might be interesting to divide the “categories” not on subject matter, but on degree of difficulty which would allow the rewards / punishments to be modified based on that – answering a harder question might get you a greater reward, and likewise missing a simple question might increase the chance of a bigger punishment (I must think of a better term).
The first thing I thought of was the Michelin star rating system for restaurants, but that only goes to three – although ratings for hotels etc go to five which is perfect. So I decided on 6 categories (which align nicely with the number of faces on a single die) and they are:
- One Star – questions anyone should be able to answer
- Two Star – little bit harder questions
- Three Star – good knowledge of basic cooking etc needed
- Four Star – some more advanced topics / questions
- Five Star – real food nerd questions
- The Chef – these are not questions per se, but random pronouncements from the Chef which can be positive or negative – think of Community Chest from Monopoly…
One of the challenges will be to determine what constitutes a 5 star question vs. a 4 star question etc…
Types of Questions
Another task is to define the types of questions that will be used in the game. This is especially important in light of the fact that I’d like to make the submission of new questions something that anyone can do, so the types need to be clearly defined. For now here’s what I have in mind:
Basic Q&A
These are the most common type of questions, similar to the type you’d find in a Trivial Pursuit type game, and can be tailored to suit the different levels of difficulty – for example a 1 star question might be a true/false question, whereas a 5 star question would be much more esoteric.
List or Ingredient Based Questions
These would be more unique to the game and would either require the player to identify the dish/drink based on a list of the ingredients, or the other way around where the player is given a dish/drink and asked to provide the main ingredients. The degree of difficulty could be determined by the number of ingredients the user needs to supply for example.
Image Based Questions
Another great thing about having an online pool of questions is that we can display other types of media such as images / movies etc.
So those are the basic ideas for the categories and questions for the game – any ideas or suggestions for other ways of approaching it would be welcome…