Lil’ Angler is the game I helped develop during the 24 hour hackathon hosted by treetu. It was written in C# using the Unity Engine and can be found here. I have wanted to participate in a hackathon since I first heard about them last year. So when a friend asked if I would be interested in going to one last week, I was overjoyed to say the least.
Since it was my first ever hackathon, I did not know what to expect. My friend had another friend that was going, so the 3 of us formed a team. We went to the hackathon with nothing more than half thought out ideas. We did however decide very early on that we were going to create a game and use the Unity Engine to do so. It was a very fun experience because game making and Unity was all brand new to me.
I’d say for the first hour, we still did not have a solid game idea. We wanted to make something simple and addictive. Originally we planned to make a tapping based game and deploy it on Android or iOS. But eventually all of our ideas started to sound like a ripoff of flappy birds… So we started brainstorming new ideas.
Eventually, we stumbled upon the idea of of a game where the user’s vision is limited possibly with a light switch. One thing led to another and we had an idea of an angler fish that swims in the deep sea trying to stay alive. Add a decaying hunger bar and an even hungry (and scary) predator, and we had a game!
Like any programming project that has a deadline, we ran into lots of “i’ve tried a billion things, why isn’t my code working?” and “I found the error, it was a semi-colon…” All in all, we did not run into that many unfixable problems. By 6AM we felt like we had a presentable project which warranted a quick nap.
I think I was very lucky to work with people who have been to other hackathons. They knew what had to be done in order to have a working demo. We shared a to-do lists that separated high and low priority tasks. With the to-do lists, we had the essentials components of our game such as player movement, fish and predator behavior, and light behavior completed as soon as possible. It allowed us to have a presentable demo within the first 12 hours and allowed us to be creative in terms of implementing new ideas as they come up.
If I could go back in time and do this hackathon again, I would not change a thing. However, I do plan on doing things differently next time just for the experience. Next time I would:
Feel free to leave a comment below :) Happy Hacking!