Following my trivia games, I’ve decided to start working on a TV shows trivia. The first step of creating a trivia game, is to make sure I have enough data, and that I can represent it in a way
that my engine can generate questions.Representing the data for TV shows as nodes in a graph is relatively easy. I can create nodes for the following objects:
- Show – this represent a show, such as Friends or Breaking Bad
- Characters – this will represent characters that appear in shows – Sheldon Cooper (from The Big Bang Theory), or Joey Tribbiani from Friends and Joey
- Actors – the people playing the characters – Jim Parsons that plays Sheldon Cooper
These three are the obvious ones. Let’s take a look at some more difficult objects:
- Year – the year that a show premiered, or ended
- Tagline – Most shows these days have a tagline – Gilmore Girls used Best friends first. Mother and daughter second.
- Quotes – Elementary’s Sherlock Holmes saying I expect nothing, which is why I am such an exceptional detective.
Of course, we can also add a few images-based objects:
- Show Image
- (optionally) Season Image
- Character Image
- Actor Image
Given those 9-10 objects, we can start working on the relationships between them (and for each relationship, it’s inverted relationship):
- Shows contain characters — Characters appear in shows
- Shows have actors — Actors participate in shows
- Actors play characters (in show) — Characters are played by actors (in show)
- Show premiered in year — Year when show premiered
- Show ended in year — Year when show ended
- Show has tagline — Tagline belongs to show
- Character said quote — Quote was said by character
- Show/Character/Actor is depicted in image — Image depicts show/character/actor
- … and the list goes on…
Next post, I’ll discuss where and how we can start gathering all the data for the game.