Quickfire

Quickfire: Challenges Against The Clock was a live gameshow designed and produced by RASA Studios for Cubed!, inspired by a number of other shows such as Jeopardy, Game Changer, and Taskmaster. In the show, players are presented with a board of challenges, and only find out what they will need to do once they’ve selected them.

The show was put together by Ben, Chelsea, David, Fraser, Grant, and me. The largest part of the project was creating the list of 30 prompts, split over six categories and ranging in estimated difficulty, with some involving physical props such as wooden puzzles or cling film. We chose to have different methods of deciding the winners of challenges, including objective targets such as “the fastest team wins” or “the most correct answers wins” and subjective rulings, where the live audience would vote for their favourite attempt.

Additionally, I created a game board graphics system that could display videos (such as the show’s animated logo, designed by Chelsea and animated by Stuart), text, timers, scores, and arbitrary images (as used for the “take the best selfie” challenge that ran over the course of the break). The control panel offered a lot of flexibility during the show, allowing challenge descriptions to be saved and sent to the screen directly from the database, or typed and sent manually to the screen in case a challenge needed to be altered mid-show. The panel also allowed the “hints” shown on the main game board to be altered, which we used at the end of the show when swapping the positions of two of the donation category’s challenges.

The live show had six contestants in pairs of two: Adam and Stuart, Stuart and George, and Benedict and Callum. Fraser and I ran some of the production remotely, with me controlling the game display on the screen behind the participants, Fraser running votes, and both of us collaborating to verify answers given during trivia rounds and make other behind the scenes decisions throughout the show. Aaron provided some of the tech setup, allowing Fraser and I to talk to Chelsea, the show’s host, through an in-ear monitor, and Seb ran the stream from Cubed!’s side, including vision mixing the show.

If given the opportunity to run the show again, there are some improvements that I would like to put in place to make it even better. For example, the panel that controlled the game board could have been better organised, with some of the finer-grained controls being moved to a separate page while keeping the more user-friendly buttons front and centre. I would have also liked to be able to better show the audience some of the players’ written answers, such as during the “list the most items in a category” challenges, or their phone screens during the “get from Minecraft to SpecialEffect on Wikipedia only clicking links” challenge.

Overall, working on Quickfire was an absolute joy, and it was made all the better for being able to work on it with such talented friends.