Conclusion—and Beyond

We have created an interesting little quiz round that is clear and responsive and tracks the player's score. But let's be honest—it isn't a very intelligent design. With good questions, this game will be fun to play, but it is never going to be fun to develop, and maintenance will be a tedious feat of endurance. To create the second (or the nth) question will require an effort comparable to the work we just did creating the first.

In the next chapter we make the same user experience a much better experience for those of us who develop the game. Any work that is done creating buttons will be done only once. Software and data-driven elements will leverage the investment we make in the first question and take us one step closer to a clever solution designed around a thin Flash component fed by a rich XML trivia server.