Woohoo! We just played the first working version of our new Picture Quiz multiplayer game mode!

Planeto Picture Quiz

The objective of the game is to uncover the underlying image by answering different questions correctly. The player guessing the image motif first wins the round.

If everything goes as planned, we should be able to deploy this game mode some time next week. *crossing our fingers*

First Quiz Race

We just played our first-ever Quiz Race!

It’s still rough around the edges, but if everything goes as planned, you will all be able to race at the end of next week. Keeping our fingers crossed!

A new version of Planeto arriveth. And there was much rejoicing.

Enhancements to the Daily Quiz mail made’em happy.

Configuration of the Quiz Widget made’em smile.

And new Quests got’em delirious and blissful.

But t’was the future that made’em ecstatic.

For on the horizon there was multiplayer.

Competition and cooperation in droves.

Practiceth now: play.planeto.com.

Or forever holdeth your piece.

Amen.

Yay, a new version of Planeto Quiz is out!

We’ve polished a few things within the game, and added some new features:

The Planeto Daily Quiz

Want a daily dose of interesting and fun quizzes? About everything from historical happenings to current affairs? Just submit your email address and configure your quiz subscription in the User Settings!

Share Quiz With Friends

After completing a question set you are now able to share it with any one of your friends. Compare your results and get inspired to create your own quiz!

Quiz Banner Widget

Planeto Quiz Widget

When you create a quiz in Planeto Creator, you can now create a Widget Link and get an HTML-code to embed the widget into your own blog or website. Check out planeto.com to see how it works on a live website.

Treasure

Treasure is now received as separate items, instead of bundles which you need to open. Treasure drops down to the right of the quiz area – just as before!

Have fun quizzing!

Happy Holidays!

It’s the 24th of December today, which means Christmas Eve in Sweden!

We would like to thank all of you for this wonderful year and wish you all a Happy Holiday and a Happy New Year!

To keep you busy during the holidays we’ve created some new jingling quizzes:

Santa Around the World

Christmas Movies

Christmas (General)

Christmas Now and Then

Christmas Landmarks

Winter Sports

Christmas Traditions

Which of Santa’s Reindeer Are You?

Which Christmas Gift Are You?

See you all next year!

The Nobel Prize award ceremony is today. Big congrats to all the brilliant laureates being celebrated on this day!

The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony

And what better way to join the celebration than to check what you know about the Nobel Prize?

We’ve got two quizzes: Easy and Not-so-Easy.  Click the links and take the challenge, you know you want to!

Update: and as an added bonus, here’s a third Nobel Prize Quiz. This one is a real challenge!

We’re right now developing something we call a Self Quiz (a.k.a. Cosmo Quiz or Personality Quiz),  in essence a type of quiz that is focused on determining (for example) the personality of  a player, rather than testing knowledge of a specific topic. A typical example found on Facebook is ‘Which Star Wars character of the light side are you?‘

The first hard-coded test of a Planeto self quiz

These quizzes are not (and will never be) at the core of the Planeto experience, but we decided to add them for two specific reasons:

1. Many people, including us, think these quizzes are often fun; and
2. They can be very viral, spreading quickly between friends on Facebook. It’s a perfect way to get people introduced to Planeto — they get into the game through a Self Quiz, and then hopefully we can get them started on the deeper Planeto experience. Sneaky, aren’t we!

And of course, anyone can create their own Self Quizzes as well. Hopefully we can deploy this live soon, maybe already next week. Stay tuned!

By the way, we’re a little unsure about what to call this type of quiz. Right now we’re calling it a Self Quiz internally, and use ‘Personality Quiz’ in the interface, but that doesn’t feel completely correct since it can be about much more than personality. Any suggestions?

At Planeto we’re big fans of lean and agile software development. Our philosophy is very simple and iterative: let’s design new features quickly (just-in-time design), implement a first version, see how it works (e.g. get feedback from our players), redesign, and implement again.

Since we started the company we’ve tried to tweak the Scrum development process to fit our needs: weekly sprints, feature backlog, user stories, burndown charts, and whatnot. However, although Scrum is considered a very agile, low-overhead methodology, we still consistently found ourselves spending too much time adhering to the Scrum principles instead of just getting things done.

With our iterative design principle, very short sprints (one a week), and goal to deploy live after every sprint, even Scrum has not been agile enough for us. And we realized that neither time boxing nor progress forecasting (both features of Scrum) were that important for us.

Last week we decided to try the Kanban methodology and this Monday we re-tweaked our brains and are now all happy Kanban’ists. (For those with a deeper interest in development methodologies, we can highly recommend reading Kanban vs Scrum.)

The first version of our Kanban board

It’s only been a few days, but it already feels very liberating. Our goal is now not to complete sprints every week, but rather to get a continuous development flow going. And then deploy live regularly (hopefully every week) once we have new features to introduce to our players.

There is no weekly start-and-stop of sprints, just a nice continuous development flow. Feeeeels gooood..

We’ll let you know how it goes!

The last few months have been hectic with a lot of new big features that are now implemented!

We are very proud to introduce to you:

Play as Guest

Play without logging in to Facebook

Quests

Play a quest and experience an adventure where your goal might be to restore old papyrus rolls, win a cooking competition or hold a quest lecture in History! Some quests will be given to you from the start, some will become available after a certain amount of points. If you choose to abandon or dismiss a quest, you will have to wait a certain time period or pay 10 Gold to get a new quest. Go win that cooking quest!

Travel the world with quests

Question Sets & Question Set Leaderboard

Answer 10 questions about your favourite hobby, artist, movie or anything you are good at. You will receive Question Sets as an item that you can place in your action bar and use. You can also create your own Question Sets – let your creativity flow!

Can you beat the others teams?

Teams & Team Leaderboard

Use 100 Gold to create your own team and invite all your friends! Check the team leaderboard every day and see if your team can beat the other teams. The Team Leaderboard is reset every Monday at noon (Central European Time).

Jackpot

During certain streaks you have the opportunity to get a jackpot. The chances to win the jackpot increases when you reach a higher streak. The size of the jackpot depends on how many points your friends have gotten through playing Planeto Quiz.

More questions and items

We’ve added 6000 English questions (to a total of 14 000) and 60 000 new items!

Rewards

Every now and then you will get the opportunity to get small rewards. Click your friend’s Planeto link on Facebook and receive some Gold, share your score to Facebook and receive some more Gold. Don’t miss out on the chances!

As always, we want to thank all of our players for your great feedback and bug reports. This means a lot to us and helps us to develop the best quiz in the world.

Don’t hesitate to report any new bugs or feedback in our forum.

Have you seen any purple grapes or leaves flowing down your inventory recently?

New feature - Collectibles

If so, it’s one of our newest features – Collectibles!

At the moment they’re only there to look nice but as we will be adding Quiz Quests and other features in the coming months, finding the right Collectible (s) can be required to accomplish a specific challenge.

Exciting things are happening at the Planeto Office right now. Stay tuned!