G4/TechTV X-Play Game Client

TechTV had a great project: "interactive televison without a set-top box." Apparently their audience had a huge percentage of people (like me, come to find out) who co-located their PC with their TV and/or had TV tuner cards in their PC's. This opened things up for some interesting possibilities...

Fluid, Inc. first built a socket server application to read signals embedded in the vertial blanking interval of a video signal and translate that into application server commands. We then created this Flash game client to serve real-time quiz games whose runtime events were driven not by a human, but rather by the video signal itself. We handled all runtime communication through Jabber, an open-source chat protocol, but all client-side browser interaction was handled in Flash.

The game features broadcast-synched trivia questions, a leaderboard, a chat module, and both score and duration indicators, all updating in real time through Jabber. The graphics, while appearing quite customized, were built to be easily swapped out should the game need to be prebranded for another proprerty.

Our production team was quite small: one account manager, one project manager, one programmer and myself. I created both the information architecture, visual design, sound design, and quite a bit of the asset production.

Although it's all Flash-based, I can't serve up a demo without the Jabber server installed and running. A screen shot of a typical screen state is shown on the left.

The week this project was due, TechTV was bought by Comcast and merged with the G4 network. The future of this unique online quiz game remains to be seen, but to date this project has never gone live.