Hyperquiz

Dev Blog #0 | What is HYPERQUIZ?

InceptionSince 2020, I have owned and operated BPtrivia.com, a year-round online trivia league with stat tracking and leaderboards. Our amazing team of writers crank out thousands of trivia questions every year for our league, all of them hand-written and graded. We don't recycle our questions in our online competitions, so our database of 25,000+ questions lies dormant. New players can visit the archive to see old questions, but can't interact with them. We want to utilize our ever-growing question database in a unique, interactive experience. Enter: HYPERQUIZ - the premiere free-answer trivia game for PC and Mac. GameplayHYPERQUIZ is what I'm calling a Trivia Battle Royale. Simply put, you'll join a room of players, answer trivia questions quickly to build your HYPERGAUGE, and then, once your gauge is full, be the first to answer a question correctly to win the match. This is a format inspired by a niche Trackmania cup event, and it works perfectly in a gameshow style trivia game! It rewards speed and correctness, but ensures that even if you're losing, you're never out of it. Where are we?HYPERQUIZ has been under active development since July, 2025. It's a solo project and I still have a day job, so it's slow at times - but progress has been consistent and I'm very happy with what we have to show already. Infrastructure and PlatformHYPERQUIZ runs on Electron, a lightweight, open source framework for desktop apps. If you're reading this on Discord, or use Slack for work, you're already using an Electron app! Typical Steam games need a physics engine like Unity or Unreal, but luckily we're in the business of text, so we can get away with a more lean environment. The backend servers for matchmaking and quiz lobbies is a barebones Node.js application that facilitates incredibly fast communications with the Electron app via websockets. Because of our lean infrastructure, server communication has a blazingly fast ceiling, which results in an amazing trivia experience. Demo BuildA demo build is available for internal testers, and has the following capabilities: Players can join an online lobby and play HYPERQUIZ matches to completion, which means building their HYPERGAUGE and activating it for the win!Players can play the "Speed" difficulty, which is an easy subset of our question databaseUser profiles are fetched from Steam, using avatar and usernamePlayers can customize their victory theme and nameplate titleWe're looking for internal testers - if you'd like alpha access to the demo now, please DM me on Discord or reply to this post!What's next(fest)?Steam Nextfest is in February, which showcases demos of upcoming games. This is a soft deadline for me to fine-tune the demo and provide a high-quality vertical slice of the game. Short term goals: Submit the demo for Steam approval, publish the demo to all Steam usersHold weekly quiz nights where players can expect higher volume of players for matchmakingReceive and implement feedback for gameplay details, including scoring, room size, difficulty, and interfaceAllow more customization for avatars, colors and victory themesLong-term Vision,HYPERQUIZ is still in its infancy, but, if player engagement is high and all goes as planned, expect to see the following in the full release: Private rooms to play solo or invite your friendsCurated quizzes (from the BPtrivia Blitz and Special archive)Player progression - unlock new themes, avatars, titles, etc.Live tournaments and eventsThank You!Just by reading this, you're already participating in the development of HYPERQUIZ. I'm really excited to start this journey with each and every one of you, thank you so, so much for reading and following!