Inspiration
We thought of a way to let people escape from the hard work of Hackathon's projects, this is why we wanted to make an escape room, one of the most compelling and fun games of our days! With EscapeTheHackathon, hackers can improve team working, have fun, meet new friends and distract themselves for a little bit.
What it does
Our web app lets people join rooms of 4 people through the Hackathon's wristband authentication. The participants have 10 minutes to complete a series of challenges and find all of the three keys to get out of the room. The game encourages the players to come together to face difficulties and will help them to break the ice and get to know each other.
How we built it
We started brainstorming different ideas of participational games that could be fun while also useful for teamwork training and for making new friends. Our game would have been connected to the Hackathon's environment, unleashing new ways of engaging. We built it from scratch starting form the backend, using nodejs; we learnt how to use WebSockets and socket.io framework to have continuous communication across all four devices. Then we started going parallel with developing the frontend with reactjs, creating primitives that would fit our use case. And by the way, the game was hand-drawn in its integrity.
Challenges we ran into
This was our first time developing a game, and we can finally say that we loved it! Not knowing how to build a game we started by interviewing other fellow hackers to better understand what kind of game they would have liked to play. It has been very difficult, in particular deciding the game-dynamics, because we wanted everything to be well-fit for the hackers that would have played the game. Also we ran into technical challenges, learning sockets was not an easy game, but we managed to get through it. Last but not least the most difficult challenge has been concentrating, because having so many fun activities took our focus a little bit out of developing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned
We are very proud of our first game, learning game design was not an easy challenge, and we thank iThinkUPC for giving us the opportunity to do such. Also we are very proud of our technical achievements, seeing for the first time our game lobby populating with test players has been an important achievement to celebrate!
What's next for EscapeTheHackathon
Surely this won't be the end of our game, we want to bring our app to real hackers, producing first a PWA and then a native app to publish on the App Store. We would really like to have our game used by hackers to meet new friends at an Hackathon (maybe next year's HackUPC? ;) )
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