November 2019 – Thijs' world

5 months of QuizWitz on Airconsole

Airconsole is an awesome project by Swiss startup ‘N-Dream’. It offers a ‘game console in the cloud‘ where the games are played on a smart tv / laptop / … and the players use smartphones to as controllers. Most games are party games, so there is an obvious match with QuizWitz.

QuizWitz has been available on Airconsole since july, and since there is very little information on how games on Airconsole generally fare (and there are no NDAs that prevent me from sharing), I’ve decided to share the results of publishing QuizWitz on the Airconsole network.

Statistics: QuizWitz is the 23th most popular game on the network, yay! I should note that the ranking changes frequently and violently, QuizWitz has been jumping between 40 and 20 for the past few weeks.

Revenue since July 2019. Lets not quit that dayjob just yet.

Airconsole has recently raised $3 million in a series A funding round, so I’m pretty excited to see where the platform is going from here.

Project digital drink vouchers – part 3

After a bit of a break, I turned back to the digital drink voucher project. Most of the functionality described in the earlier blogs have been implemented, and I have decided to release the whole thing under the GPLv3 license. I have also setup a rudimentary website at drinks.catlab.eu. Feel free to use our hosted instance, just don’t rely on it too much 🙂

I’ve also removed the vendor specific authentication mechanics from the open source project, so you can now just set it up with the traditional laravel authentication forms.

I’ve also started writing some documentation, but for now it’s limited to describing how I’ve designed the NFC topup cards. Please give it a read and let me know if there is any scenario that might still be causing problems (other than the ones I’ve already described in the file).

Next week we’re using the NFC cards ‘in the wild’ for the first time. An earlier test with 3 teams at the first quiz resulted in a few bugfixes, but now I’m confident that the system should work as expected.

Hopefully…