Dolumar goes open source

Dear lab cats

We have fascinating news about our first game which we made back in 2008: We decided to make Dolumar open source!

What?

As of now, the game’s code is accessible to everyone. The game will remain online and you can still play, but if you want, you can start using its source code to mess around. Got any ideas for our persistent browser-based game Dolumar?

Find everything you need at GitHub and start puzzling!

Why?

Though Dolumar was once a thriving community, this has faded over the years. Until we can do a complete remake, we decided to enter the realm of Open Source with it! We know people from many different backgrounds were present in the community, including coders and game developers. We want to give them a chance to host their own Dolumar games, or perhaps push some interesting changes.

Great!

This opens up new possibilities for an old and rusty, but unique and challenging game we loved to play ourselves! We hope you can see some treasure in there.

If there’s any questions, don’t hesitate to ask us. Also, don’t forget to share this news with the world!

How QuizWitz defines the roles in its community

Dear Labcats, dear developer friends

As you might know, we’re working on QuizWitz. It’s a party quiz game with its own community, something our mentor at StartIt@KBC knows a thing or two about (this is an understatement). He urged us to get to the bottom of our platform and its future users. This post is an overview of what we defined so far. (You can also read this post on Gamasutra!)

The Community

A community is like a little society in itself, and in a society everyone fulfills another role, just like in real life. In QuizWitz, users will do very different things depending on why they join or come back to the game. From the ‘why’ we can also deduct the ‘what’, and that’s a valuable insight for any developer.

If we know how and why it will be used, we can not only understand our users better, we can reach out to them and provide the right care and features. This means it’s not only a marketing tool to get to know your future players better. It serves a bigger purpose. To do this exercise, we imagined QuizWitz in 5 years time, being a vibrant ecosystem.

The Roles

We decided to define 4 roles for our community. We imagine each of them has a preference in terms of features. First of all, we tried to define the ‘why’ and ‘what’ starting from our most important game elements.

The overview below shows our three different feature categories: The multiplayer mode, the community network and the single player mode. Depending on why the user joins the community, he or she will have other goals. Those are shown between the brackets behind the role names. The colored features are the favorites per role.

As you can see, the first role we call the Tourist. They’re a fun bunch looking for a quick game with friends or family. They also like to explore and play single player mode if struck by boredom. This role doesn’t register upfront and doesn’t engage too much in the community.

The Journalists are a whole other story. They love to mingle with other users and let their voice be heard. They register to comment and rate rounds, as well as play quick games against friends. They love a bit of everything and like to test their knowledge against Professors.

As Famous Quizzers play to grow in the multiplayer rankings, they will organize fun evenings for their friends and family. They also love to show them who knows the most about these topics. They will create their own rounds about topics in which they feel other quiz creators missed things.

Professors like to play against other Professors, but their favor testing their knowledge about different kinds of trivia. They love to explore the network on their own and give feedback, as well as create unique quiz rounds about topics they know much about.

Conclusion

We believe QuizWitz has everything to facilitate these different roles, though we still have a huge job ahead of us. It’s a good thing we’re no quitters! Every community needs its players, so please do share the QuizWitz name and fame.

If you have any thoughts or comments about these roles, please do leave your paw in the comments below or tell us on Facebook, Twitter or in an email!

Thanks a lot and don’t forget to kiss the cat goodnight!

QuizWitz update: Game controller designs and the feedback evening

Dear lab cats!

Past few weeks of July, we’ve been updating the codes on our CatLab website and designing a new version of our game controller views! So tests were necessary, and that’s why we organized a true “QuizWitz play and action evening event for awesome people”!

Feedback Event

We didn’t call it that of course but we organized a fun evening with some friends from each of us to create a diverse group of ‘test subjects’. There were drinks, snacks and feedback from 12 people (we just didn’t have the space for more)!

It was a fun evening with lots of quiz questions and winners! As people left for home, we immediately started to plan our next fedback evening. Here are some pictures but we have some more on our QuizWitz Facebook page!

Controller designs

The game controller screens were an issue to tackle. We wanted to give players more instant feedback as they answered questions. Our designer Katia came up with some fun designs you can see here. Better yet, test them in action in QuizWitz directly!

Roles on the platform

If QuizWitz is to become a living and vibrant community of people, we have to see it as a tiny society. By defining roles people can assume, we can reach the right people and design the right features for them (and you). We’re working on that by thinking ahead, looking at what different people will be doing on QuizWitz in 5 years. More on this will follow later in August.

Screencast

Lastly, we’re preparing to create some videos in which we go over our updates and give insight in our development process. If you know any topics we should not forget, please do comment in the whiskers box below, or on Facebook, Twitter or send us an email!

As always, thanks for reading and don’t forget to adore the cat!

QuizWitz feedback by Atsusacon visitors

Last week we had a booth at Atsusacon, a Belgian convention about Japan and its culture, organized for the first time on our home turf, Ghent! We had a cozy experience with people staying to play quizzes about flags and even chocolate.

We installed some poufs for players to relax while they played, and they seemed to appreciate it. People played exactly 100 quizzes about Japan.

Our poll

We came prepared! As people finished playing, we would kindly ask if they wanted to fill out our feedback form. We created an infograph with those results. As you can see, everyone would recommend QuizWitz to their friends, and no one would never play! We think that’s a great result.

Although we were most afraid people would not understand how to set up a game, everyone seemed to be able to join a game with ease. Based on these results our players were between 18 and 25 years old and nearly half of them were students.

Next time, we will edit some of the questions to get more in depth information, and starting today, our poll is also online: ctlb.eu/qwfeedback​

Thanks again and thanks in advance!

Don’t forget to keep the cat inside during a storm.

QuizWitz will be at Atsusacon!

Dear lab cats

We have a short news update for next week! We’ll be present at Atsusacon, so come drop by and play QuizWitz. We’ll bring questions about Asia and its culture.

It’s been a while since Made In Asia kept our organizational skills at maximum level. Next week, we’ll be at Atsusacon in ICC Ghent on 18 and 19 July. We’ll bring questions about everything Asia-lovers hold dear, like the origin of bubble tea, the first manga and much more!

We’re curious about your preference. Would you rather play a quiz round with a theme of your choosing? Or with lots of different questions popping up at random?

Next to that, we’ll bring our buttons again!

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And if you create a quiz round on our platform about Asia, we might just use it at Atsusacon! We hope to meet you there