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:
- naming the movie title from a single frame from the film
- naming the movie title from a short audio dialogue snippet from the film
- naming the movie title from a short audio snippet from the film's soundtrack
- naming the movie title in which a given actor played a certain role
- 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:
- "P" or "S": Pass or Skip that clue, to come back to it later
- "C" or "R": Correct or Right, if the team gets it correct
- "I" or "W": Incorrect or Wrong, if the team gets it incorrect
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