Suppose I design a trivia game and then show it to a publisher who likes it enough to publish it. Would the publisher typically take the mechanics of the game and come up with new questions for it, or would the publisher use the questions in my prototype?
Anyone have any idea?
I ask this because I am currently designing a trivia game. I think it has interesting mechanics with a cool "twist", but I wonder how much effort I should put in the questions. Of course, I need enough questions to be able to play the prototype a bunch of times, but do I really need to come up with 1000+ questions? That's a lot of effort to put in a prototype that might or might not get published.
- René Wiersma
I'm not a publisher, but if I was and I saw that your questions were of sufficient quality, I would certainly use them in the final version of the game. As you say, it takes a lot of time coming up with them and any publisher would want to maximize their output by using as much of your creativity as possible (and reducing the amount of work they ned to do to bring your game to market).
I would say make as many questions as you can, both for playtesting and for submitting. The more you game submit (the closer to a finished and complete set) the better light in which the publisher would see your game.
Best of luck!!