Let me tell you about Pop Answers
I've waited a while to do a write-up on my latest project, Pop Answers, mostly because of some uncertainty involved with the past two months of my career and because I have been working on and testing the project itself. As of July 12, 2008, I started my own sole proprietorship dedicated to making games and social apps for Facebook, Mappdev, and Pop Answers is my first product on the games side of things.
Pop Answers is very much like Family Feud, except you play solo with your scores compared against that of your friends. I remember when I got into making online games, my fiancee would often throw out ideas for what she wanted to see developed, and Family Feud was one of those ideas. At the time, however, I couldn't figure out a way to do it simple and approachable enough that would work. When I sat down in the middle of July to come up with new games, I came up with something that I thought would work. Here's what I have:
In Pop Answers, there is a new "game" or survey to play each day. When you pick a game to play, you are taken to the gameplay screen, which uses an AJAX interface to provide the interactivity. I use Facebook cookies as a session handler to store the data on the backend for the current game and keep the interface zippy. My comparison algorithm for the answers you submit involves a combination of string normalization and elimination of plural forms along with a bit of typo-forgiveness to make it relatively user-friendly while still requiring that you submit the correct answers to the survey. You get 60 seconds to try and guess all the answers, with three added bonuses:
- If you enter something that is part of an answer, you will get a hint.
- If you spend 6 tickets, you will get a random answer.
- If you want to replay today's game, you can for just 1 ticket.
You get 1 ticket for each friend you invite per day, so I'd say things are as easy as can be. When you complete a game, you can view all the answers if that game is from a previous day, or you can view what you already submitted if it is today's game, and you can always view the combined leaderboard with the scores of your friends.
I put a lot of work into the UI for this game, and I've gotten good compliments about it. There were a couple of things I made sure to adhere to:
- Bold colors with lots of contrast to keep the player alert.
- Conventions for where and how I display information.
- Clear indicators of when the game is validating each submission.
- Constant context regarding your friends' scores to keep the competition strong.
There are still a couple things I need to do to make Pop Answers rock-solid, such as making the answer comparisons more solid and allowing for synonyms, but I think the current product is something you can have a lot of fun playing, especially if you are a fan of Family Feud (or Family Fortunes, or Que Dice La Gente?). If you don't care for it, I should mention that I am working on other game ideas, though I don't have a lot of time with my current schedule, so development is slow. If you want to see more cool games, then at least give Pop Answers a try and share your opinions with me. I can never get enough user testing.
Looking very nice. That's an app I'd actually be willing to give a test. Keep up the good work, Christian. Looking forward to seeing more.
You really invented this? I'm addicted…