The opportunity
Most trivia games are a quiz with a timer. We wanted the knowledge to matter where you use it: on a board, with troops, against an opponent who takes the ground you leave open. Trivia Troops started as a shelved game idea in 2023 and became the studio’s first product.
What we built
A 1v1 game in the browser: three troops, a base, and a hex board where every hex is a category. Every move and every attack is a question. Answer right and your troops advance; answer wrong and they hold still. Knock out the enemy troops or bring down their base to win.
Around the game we built the systems that keep it alive: real-time multiplayer, player and category ratings, question difficulty that adapts to the player, a question pipeline in English and Croatian, weekly Duel Night tournaments, a league, rivalries between players, and a practice bot.
What was hard
- Real time with a turn clock. Two players, one clock, flaky phone connections. The server is the single source of truth; the client never decides a result.
- Rating knowledge, not just winning. A player has a rating per category, and every question has one too. Both move with play data, and the starting values were tuned when the data said so, not by guesswork.
- Questions at scale in two languages. AI-assisted authoring and translation, human review, and a pipeline that tracks how every question performs.
- A board you can read on a phone. The whole battle has to make sense at a glance, on a small screen, in the middle of a match.
How we tested it
Live testing events with players in the room first, then pre-beta weeks with a fixed online night. Telemetry on every match, and a monthly readout of what people actually did rather than what they said. Several assumptions did not survive it: people happily played friends, but getting strangers online at the same time was the real problem, so the weekly Duel Night and the league grew around a fixed time instead of “play any time”.
What happened
Trivia Troops is live at app.triviatroops.com, in English and Croatian, with Duel Night every week. On the back of it, the studio joined the HAMAG-BICRO accelerator programme and took in its first investors.
What we learned
- Prototype, test, measure, build works. Every big change started as the smallest version that could answer the question.
- For a small community, a fixed weekly time beats “play any time”.
- Ratings need to be explained in the game, or nobody trusts them.
- The systems built for one game (ratings, adaptive difficulty, content pipelines, events) are reusable, and that is what the studio offers partners.
