Online interactive quiz, à la Chris Tarrante, built using HMTL5 video and Flash streams. Featuring a jQuery/JavaScript driven front-end, saved game functionality and leaderboard stats, the game is promoted by an e-marketing campaign, together with player-generated email invites and certificates sent out directly from the game.
Testing your online savvy
The idea of the game was to test user’s digital knowledge, as part of a drive to enable employees to become more conversant with digital technologies and online marketing techniques.
One of the key outcomes of the game was to encourage employees to attend centre of excellence training to upgrade their digital marketing skills.
Old and new together
Probably the biggest challenges of this project was getting the game to work both on the iPad and on a large installed base of staff XP/IE6 machines. This meant using HTML Video for the iPad (since Flash is not available on iOS) and Flash streams for every other platform.
Back to front
The back-end is ASP.NET with SQL Server, used to store player ids and game attempts and statistics, and also to serve up the game sections up to the browser where the gameplay itself was directed in a custom game engine designed specifically for the project.
jQuery’s AJAX functionality provided a solid mechanism for background communication between the browser and the back-end during the game, for example to transparently load previous player answers to populate the lifelines.
WordPress or ASP.NET?
Although this game was built on ASP.NET , WordPress could just as easily have been used as the back-end. In fact, the game is also designed to be capable of running as a front-end to the WordPress platform. One big advantage of using WordPress over ASP.NET is the enhanced player and game management afforded by the familiar WordPress admin dashboard. A further advantage is portability.
Developing this game as a plugin in WordPress would allow for simple installation, regional variations according to need and multiple languages. All administration and updates are raised to the level of a business function, rather than a technical function, reducing costs substantially.
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For £1000, is Flash going to be around in 5 years?…
This is the second interactive quiz around the millionaire model we’ve built. The previous quiz was made in Flash entirely, but everyone recognises that Flash probably isn’t the future. Visual Studio 10 was the IDE, other tools used included Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Media encoder for encoding alternative low/high bandwidth streams for testing.
All-in-all, a very interesting and technically demanding project but very satisfying to be part of.