Ask Away

Project Context

Ask Away was an interpersonal trivia game created for friends who wanted to test how well they knew one another in a casual setting.

The game was built for Discord as a port from an earlier Zoom version. It focused on synchronous gameplay, allowing players to compete in real time inside Discord. The format shared some party-game DNA with Heads Up, while adding unique categories and meta gameplay elements to keep players engaged over multiple sessions.

My role as lead developer was to port the original Angular version over to PixiJS. Once the port was complete, my next focus was developing A/B tests for the game. The port team consisted of three people: myself as lead developer, a producer and an artist who joined once meta mechanics were being implemented.

The game had a trial run on a public Discord testing server, which is why I can include it in the portfolio. It did not go to wider public release and has since been removed from the testing server.

Porting The Game To Discord

The useful engineering work was not just rebuilding screens in PixiJS. The original game had been built for Zoom, so the port needed to reinterpret the flow for Discord: joining from an activity surface, playing synchronously with people already in a server and keeping platform integration separate from game rules.

I kept the gameplay layer separate from Discord SDK concerns so category data, round flow, player state and rendering could change without making every platform behaviour part of the game loop.

Discord SDK

The Discord SDK integrated the game with Discord, allowing players to start and join games directly from their Discord environment.

The SDK also handled platform-level concerns such as user authentication and embedded activity behaviour, which were central to making the game feel native to Discord rather than like an external web page.

Airtable Integration

Question data lived in Airtable: questions, answers, categories and related game metadata. That kept content updates out of the codebase and gave the team a clearer workflow for changing trivia content.

Using Airtable also gave the team a clearer workflow for managing content as the game expanded into categories and meta systems.

Zoom Game Port

Ask Away was originally developed as a standalone Zoom application. Porting it to Discord made the game easier to access for groups already spending time together in the same server.

Instead of inviting people through external links, players could start and join directly from Discord, making the experience better suited to casual group play.

A/B Testing

After the port, A/B testing explored game mechanics and feature direction. Multiple versions of features could be tested with players to understand what improved engagement and overall user experience.

One outcome of that process was a category shop, allowing players to purchase and unlock additional categories using in-game currency. That added a meta-progression layer and gave players another reason to keep playing.