Designing an Unlimited Mode for a Daily Trivia Game

My daily trivia game had a problem most daily games would love to have: players finished the day's seven questions and wanted more.

The game is my independent Krillion edition at littlefungames.com/krillion — inspired by Krillion, not affiliated with it, with my own questions and scoring. (I wrote about the base game, and corrected an earlier post, here.) The daily set is deliberately small: seven questions, the same for everyone, gone at 00:00 UTC. That scarcity is the point. But "come back tomorrow" is a hard sell to someone standing there today asking for another round.

So I built an unlimited mode. This is how it works, and the decisions behind it.

The rules in one paragraph

Unlimited runs in stages of seven questions — the same shape as a daily round. You start with three lives. A skip or a timeout costs one life; running out of lives ends the run. Finishing a stage with a life missing gives one back, up to the cap of three. Points work exactly like the daily game: every accepted answer sits in a fixed editorial tier worth 10, 30, 60 or 100 points, and every point is ten metres of depth. Your run can end whenever you hit "Finish run" — the score is yours either way.

Decision 1: Lives, not a bigger timer

The obvious way to make a daily game "unlimited" is an endless stream of questions with no stakes. I tried that mentally for about a minute. Without an ending, a run has no story — nobody screenshots "I stopped at some point."

Lives create the arc. Three is forgiving enough that a new player survives the first stage, and tight enough that by stage four every skip is a real decision: burn a life on a category you don't know, or spend your remaining seconds hunting for any valid answer at all? The interesting tension in this game was never speed — it's knowing something true that isn't the obvious answer. Lives price the giving up, not the thinking.

Restoring one life per completed stage matters just as much. It means a good stage actively repairs a bad one, so a run is never dead until it's over. The cap of three stops strong players from banking a buffer and coasting.

Decision 2: Same mix, same library, shuffled cycle

Each stage uses the same composition as a daily set: three Standard questions, three Advanced, one Specialist. The daily game rotates categories on a ten-day cycle so a category appears once, then rests. Unlimited draws from the same library — currently 70 categories and 730 accepted answers — but on a shuffled cycle: it works through the library before anything repeats.

That last part is the whole trick. "Unlimited" is a promise about sessions, not about content. The library is finite, and the page says so. What I can guarantee is that you won't see the same category twice in a run until you've seen everything once — which, at seven questions a stage, takes a while.

It also keeps one source of truth. Daily, classic and unlimited all read the same answer lists and the same point tiers, so when a player reports a missing answer (there's a "This answer should count" button that opens an email draft), one fix improves every mode at once.

Decision 3: Unlimited must not eat the daily game

The risk with any practice mode is that it cannibalises the ritual it feeds on. Three guardrails:

• No streak credit. Unlimited results are local session records only. Your daily streak still comes from the daily set, finished during its UTC day. Archive replays don't fill missed days either.
• No spoilers. An unlimited run is not an answer key for today's questions. Modes draw from the same library but build different sessions, so grinding unlimited doesn't hand you today's set.
• The daily stays the shared one. Everyone gets the same seven daily questions; that's the one you can argue about with friends. Unlimited scores are personal bests, not a commons — and like everything else in this game, there's no leaderboard. Results live in your browser; "copy result" makes a spoiler-free summary if you want to share one.

What I'd tell another daily-game dev

If your game has a daily ritual, an unlimited mode isn't a bigger version of it — it's a different product wearing the same clothes. The daily game sells today. The unlimited mode sells one more stage. Design the ending first (lives worked for me), reuse your content library with a no-repeat cycle instead of generating more content, and protect the ritual with hard rules about what practice play can and can't earn.

The unlimited mode is live now: littlefungames.com/krillion — pick "Start unlimited dive". And if you want the full rules comparison against the daily game, I keep a guide at The Endless Dive game — named after the original Krillion's unlimited mode, which is where the idea came from.

— littlefungames