Added support for "Buzz!" controllers (Windows/Mac)
Remember these? If you played the awesome "Buzz!" games on Playstation 2 and 3 you probably still have some of these buzzers lying around. Well, now you can get them out of the basement again, because we just added support for them in Askutron Quiz Show!
As the game was just released 2 hours ago I'd like to point out a few things about the current questions and possible bugs.
During Early Access we're still actively developing the game and plainly some things are not finished yet. One of the things we're still working on is the categorization of questions according to difficulty and topic.
Difficulty
You may have noticed that there is no difficulty selection in the game yet.
The difficulty of questions is highly subjective and while we lack the data of how players handle the different questions the difficulty may be all over the place. As more and more players play the game we record how many people correctly answer each question and will be able to improve the difficulty ratings over time.
Once we have accumulated enough data to statistically determine the difficulty of most questions we will add the difficulty selection to the game.
Categories
We only introduced categories relatively late during development when we already had thousands of questions in the game. Also, categories may still change. Questions need to be manually assigned to appropriate categories. Due to the massive number of questions and limited number of hours in a day the categorization of all questions is an ongoing process. So we apologize if you occasionally encounter a question in the wrong category. This will improve over time as we manually go through the questions.
Bugs
Here and there you will still encounter bugs, though most should not be game breaking. Errors will appear as red error messages in the bottom left corner of the screen. You can just ignore them if the game continues. Errors are automatically tracked by the game so we can retroactively check what went wrong without you having to do anything.
However, sometimes it helps to have some context. If you'd like to report bugs, please use the community forum: http://steamcommunity.com/app/701280/discussions/
We're grateful for every bug report! Obviously we very much want to get rid of all the bugs.
Askutron coming to Steam Early Access on November 12!
We're happy to announce that Askutron Quiz Show will finally be available on Steam Early Access this Sunday on November 12, 2017!
We hope you'll have a nice and relaxed round of trivia with your family and friends this weekend!
Mid October Update: Completed Steam Workshop Integration, Achievements, Cloud Sync, and more
You may have noticed a rather sizeable update coming to your Steam library for Askutron recently. Here's what we changed!
Completed Steam Workshop Integration
You can now create, share, download and play downloaded quizzes via Steam Workshop!
To upload your own quiz, first create it using the included quiz editor, check the "allow sharing on Workshop" and save it. Then start the game and in the main menu press F6 to upload your quiz to the Workshop.
To download new quizzes created by other users open the Workshop page in your browser or in-game on the Themed Quiz screen by pressing X. Simply subscribe to the quizzes and they will be downloaded when you start the game the next time.
Achievements
We added 26 achievements including four hidden ones to the game! Can you unlock them all?
Cloud Sync
Cloud Synchronization now works across all platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) to synchronize your custom quizzes, user profiles and statistics.
Performance Improvements
We improved performance of the game a little so that it runs more smoothly on laptops without dedicated graphics cards, such as my Dell XPS 13. We also added a simple graphics setting that you can use to squeeze out more performance by disabling effects such as Ambient Occlusion or Anti Aliasing.
Media Bundle
Until today the game always downloaded all audio and other media files on-demand as we were still changing things. Now we added a media bundle for German and English that is included with the Steam distribution including all media files, so that you can now play the game and have the host reading questions even when you are offline!
Note that this does not included audio for user generated quizzes from the Steam Workshop. You will still need internet access in order to have those questions read out aloud.
Online Mode
The online mode is still a bit buggy at times when played with more than two computers via network. We're still working on this!
Various Smaller Improvements and Bugfixes
On top of all of this several smaller improvements and bugfixes can be found here and there.
Soon To Be Released
We're relentlessly working on getting the first version ready for Early Access! Please feel free to subscribe to our newsletter over at https://askutron.com to be notified when the game is released!
Update: Added Quiz Editor, Mode Selection, Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud and various improvements
We're happy to announce the latest update to Askutron - the Quiz show game - brought a whole bunch of improvements!
Quiz Editor
You can now use the quiz editor to create your own quizzes! Add as many questions as you like. You can even add images to the questions. By default your own quizzes will only be visible to you on your PC.
Steam Workshop
We're working on the Steam Workshop integration and are halfway there. If you enable Steamworks sharing for your quiz in the editor, you can press F6 in the main menu of the game to upload your quiz to the Steam Workshop where other players will be able to see and subscribe to your quiz!
Well, that's the first half of the integration. The second half is the part where you can actually play the quizzes created by other players. This will be released with the next update, so stay tuned! Maybe you can use the waiting time to prepare your very first quiz for the Workshop!
Mode Selection
We just added a rudimentary mode selection. Where before the sequence of game modes was fixed you can now choose which of the modes you actually want to play.
Steam Cloud
User profiles, statistics and quizzes you created are now automatically backed up using the Steam Cloud!
Category Selection
The new and improved category selection now chooses the 4 random options more intelligently, avoiding duplicates and selecting categories based on how many questions they contain relative to the total number of questions in the quiz.
Various Improvements
On top of all this we had several smaller improvements throughout the game.
Question difficulty is now managed by the game (UI for selecting the difficulty is still in progress)
2,500 new English questions added!
Answers selected on the app are now highlighted more strongly by not only increasing the size of the selected answer, but also decreasing the size of the other options
The "Ready" screen of the mobile app now also displays the QR code that other people can use to join the game
What's next
We're still working hard on getting the game ready for Early Access. Our next step is publishing the "Coming Soon" page of the game on Steam for which we still need a trailer. Working on that, too...
In the meantime we appreciate the help of our alpha testers to get rid of the remaining bugs!
Welcome to the first public alpha test of Askutron!
We just send out the keys for the very first public version of Askutron on Steam. Welcome to all of our early alpha testers! The game is not yet publicly visible on Steam as we're still preparing the actual Early Access release, just in case you're wondering.
The game is playable but still has a few kinks we need still need to iron out and a long list of features which still need to be implemented. If you encounter any problems please do not hesitate to contact us or to create a post in the community hub!
The quiz editor is not quite ready yet, but we'll let you know when it's available for testing, too.
We're continuously working on the game and of course also on the questions, so expect changes and new content regularly.
At this point we also want to express our deepest gratitude towards our assiduous question contributors Katie and Yun! <3 Check out the first two themed quizzes "All About Harry Potter" and "History of the United Kingdom".
Looking For Alpha Testers
If you are interested in testing the alpha version of the game and don't have a key yet, please sign up for our newsletter over on our website!
