Nick Zochowski About
All work

Trivium

A trivia site where every subject is a 3D stage. Its computer can be taken apart, part by part, down to the transistors and the bits.

The computer stage: a flagship gaming PC taken apart, its graphics card modelled in Blender. The tree on the right lists every level inside.
The computer stage: a flagship gaming PC taken apart, its graphics card modelled in Blender. The tree on the right lists every level inside.
Type
Software
Year
2026
Built
18 to 25 October 2026
My part
The concept and the stages, the choice of a realistic look, ruling out AI-generated 3D models, the PC builds to show, and testing every level
Built with
Claude Code (AI coding assistant)
Tools
three.js, Blender 5.2 with Python, JavaScript, Vite, Electron
Data
NASA Earth imagery, US Census places, GeoNames, 4,496 world regions

The idea

Trivia sites are lists of questions. I wanted each subject to be a place you can explore before you’re tested on it: a globe for geography, a computer you can take apart for hardware, a sky for astronomy. Explore first, then play rounds about what you just saw.

A computer you can take apart

The computer stage has eight real PC builds you could buy today, from a budget build to a workstation, with every part checked against the maker’s spec sheet. You open the case, pick a part and go inside it, one level at a time.

Wherever a part stores or moves data, the levels end at the 1s and 0s, and the last levels are working circuits: a full adder, a NAND gate, a transistor, SRAM, DRAM, flash and magnetic bits. A graphics card, for example, leads down through its tensor and ray-tracing cores, its memory controller and the GDDR7 signal, a PCIe lane, the power stage and its MOSFETs, and the display engine down to a single pixel. A tree on the side shows the path you’ve taken down, and a “learn it all” mode walks through every level with a check at the end of each lesson.

Modelling the graphics cards

The first graphics cards were drawn in code from boxes and cylinders, and they looked like toys. I wanted them to look real, and I didn’t want AI-generated 3D models, so each card is modelled by a Python script that runs in Blender. One shared kit builds fans, shrouds, heat-sink fins and backplates, and each card has its own script that sets its size and details. The same method models 26 of the inside levels.

Drawn in code (left) and modelled in Blender (right): the same RTX 5070 Founders Edition in its case.
Drawn in code (left) and modelled in Blender (right): the same RTX 5070 Founders Edition in its case.
Seven graphics cards, each built by its own Python script in Blender and rendered in Eevee.
Seven graphics cards, each built by its own Python script in Blender and rendered in Eevee.

The globe

The globe stage, with NASA’s Blue Marble imagery and five levels of rounds to play.
The globe stage, with NASA’s Blue Marble imagery and five levels of rounds to play.

The globe stage has tabs for Earth, terrain, countries, small islands and US states, with ten-question rounds of fifteen kinds at five levels. Tiny countries get bigger click targets, and a hand-checked layer sits between the map data and the player, because the raw data gets things wrong. Every country and US state opens as a raised-relief board with its towns, roads, rivers and landmarks. Two games teach the 50 states and the 195 countries, bringing each one back for review after 1, 3, 7, 21 and 60 days.

What was hard

  • Real data needs checking by hand. Somaliland, Northern Cyprus, military bases and Antarctica all broke the simple rules, and each needed a decision about how to show it.
  • Size. The world maps came to about 380 MB, so the build stopped copying them and the desktop app reads them in place.
  • Smooth movement. Going between levels felt jumpy until each move flew in at the part and dissolved into the next level, with the camera starting on the part you left.

What I’d do next

Build the Sky stage, and test the computer levels on people who don’t already know how a computer works.