About Election the Trivia Game for iOS

It all started…

It started with a board game version of Election that I illustrated. When the idea came up to create an interactive version I was contacted and of course I said - “Yeah!” And shortly afterwards I said, “That’s going to be a lot of work…”

Taking a traditional multi-player board game and turning it into a modern, single player interactive application for iOS meant a lot of game play decisions had to be made. The schedule was set. We had just over five months.

Starting in Adobe XD (moving to Sketch for final art integration and prep.). I did gameplay breakdowns. The three main ‘acts’ of the game became apparent and together the group decided on best-of-class solutions. Using XD to build simple, but semi-functional walkthroughs allowed the programmers to know exactly what had to be done when they coded the game using Apple’s Xcode.

Along with wireframes and gameplay documents, I created several hundred illustrations for the game. As the writers were creating unique events for the game and writing and proofing trivia I was designing and drawing not only gameplay elements (game cards, trivia screens) but also all the characters that decorated the gameplay events.

As viable game candidates were produced we altered gameplay and made final decisions on the trivia engine and the underlaying algorithms that made every game instance unique. And of course refined the interface.

The gameplay was straight forward: You start the game as a candidate for President. You begin with a varying amount of cash, then you needed good fortune to raise more while hoping that no political headwinds set you back. It’s all about the money. You need lots of cash to campaign in a state. (The amount of cash needed to campaign in a State is dependent on the number of Electoral Delegates in that state.) Once you select a state you answer two or three rounds of questions (‘Battleground’ states had three rounds of questions.) to ‘win’ those delegates. If you answer incorrectly the delegates were awarded to your opponent. The game tracked cash in, cash lost and cash spent on campaigning. Aside from the trivia results and which states were still in play we also added the ability to track the win-loss stats for every game instance and presented those at the end of each game.

Creating the interactive map and selection screens proved the most difficult because of screen size. I also developed and animated a dozen different scenarios for the win and loss event.

It launched on the App Store on time and into a maelstrom of politics. Election the Trivia Game garnered press in political columns and feeds. It battled for clear positioning within the ‘political games’ on the App Store and the developer team, being only 3 people, had limited ability and time to examine the marketing issues. It fit somewhere between education and trivia but faced over a dozen games that were similar enough to dilute the audience. After a little over a year the game was removed as the developer no longer had the time to update it for new API requirements. Like so many interactive and online projects, you work for months and the pages and games simply drift away into pixels. But it was great fun.

I oversaw the production of several game trailers. Unfortunately at the time most of the social media sites had tight restrictions on ads for anything political. So they didn’t get much exposure.

Election the Trivia games was one of my most favorite projects. Everyone involved wore a lot of hats to get it done and out on time.