Kevicool's New Year's Movie Trivia Game

Kevicool's New Year's Movie Trivia Game

This New Year's, my daughter talked me into having a party at my house, so we invited over lots of friends for food and fun. For the fun, I decided to create a movie trivia game that everyone could play. Using Borland's JBuilder product, I was able to quickly prototype and create a Java-based game that could be run on any computer having an installed JVM. The game consisted of each team alternatingly choosing a category from the six shown (all of which had cryptic titles), and then having to answer ten movie trivia questions before the timer ran out. For example, if a team chose a category called "Too Much Time On My Hands", they were shown ten movie frames each containing a clock (or watch), and had to name the movie for each frame. The category questions were varied, such as:
  1. naming the movie title from a single frame from the film
  2. naming the movie title from a short audio dialogue snippet from the film
  3. naming the movie title from a short audio snippet from the film's soundtrack
  4. naming the movie title in which a given actor played a certain role
  5. naming the movie title based on visual rebus (pictogram) clues
Anyway, everyone seemed to enjoy the game, so I thought I would make it available for download in case others may wish to play it. It comes with absolutely no documentation, but I think you'll find it very easy to create and add new categories. I used WinDVD to generate the movie screen captures, but any movie player that allows screen grabs should work as well.

To run the game, download and unzip this zip file, and run the JAR file within the Java JVM. The first thing you should probably do is maximize the application, and then increase the category font size to something more suitably larger. You can also set the display font if necessary. You select a category by clicking on the category button, which will then bring up the start screen. The goal of the selected category will be shown in the status bar, and pressing the "B" key will start the timer. By default, you are given ten seconds per clue (for a total of 100 seconds). The time length per clue can also be set to something more suitable to your audience. Once the first clue is displayed, the following keys can be pressed:

When all the clues have been answered, or if the timer runs out, that category is finished. You can press any number key (1, 2, 3, ..., 0) to reshow that clue. When you are done, and ready to show the category selections again, press the "D" key (for Done).

The categories are contained within numbered directories ("001", "002", etc.), and will be displayed in numeric order. Within each directory you will find a single text file describing the category. If the category is a visual or audio category, the image JPEG's or audio WAV's will also be found there. Please note that all WAV files must not be larger than around 800KB in size. If they are too large, they will not play within my application -- (must be a Java thing).

The game I played had nearly forty categories; however, the downloadable game I am making available only contains seven, showing a variety of category types. I wanted to keep the file size under control, hence only giving seven categories. I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I had creating it.

Download the Game!!
(answers to the seven categories can be found here)

Kevin L. Suffecool, Jan 2006