Strongest today vs strongest in history

Inspiration

I was inspired by playing Plague Inc. on the plane ride here. Somewhere along the way, I realized that running a hackathon is basically an outbreak: you need word to spread, people to show up, and sometimes people might try to stop you.

What it does

It’s Plague Inc., but instead of infecting the world you’re spreading word about your hackathon. You run Bear University’s hackathon against Tree University (led by the ever-scheming Leland Sr.) in a 10-minute game. You hire a crew, evolve a tech tree split into Hype, Organization and Talent, pop bubbles for tech points, and take over regions of the map one dot at a time. Along the way, a news feed shows the effect you have on the world and throws decisions at you. It all ends on Hackathon Day, with live crises and an election-night results reveal of Bear vs Tree.

How I built it

It’s a browser game hosted on GitHub Pages, and you can add it to your iPhone Home Screen to play full screen. I wrote the design spec and the event jokes, and used Claude as my engineering team to build it in milestones. To tune the balance, we ran simulated bot players through thousands of games against Tree, adjusting costs until a good strategy wins about 60% of the time.

Challenges we ran into

There were 3 main challenges I ran into: Balance: the early versions left players with too much money and let them buy the whole tech tree. I wanted to make players make actual decisions, not just cheese through the whole game. Mobile: I assumed most of the judges would only have their phones on them, so I made sure mobile was the key focus of the game. Balancing clutter vs. visual clarity was more challenging than the technical details itself. In addition to this, Safari does not let websites go full screen, so the game supports being added to the Home Screen instead. Fun: what's the point of a game if it isn't fun? I had to study up on why I actually liked playing Plague Inc. and incorporate those elements into my project. In addition to this, getting that tactile progression in the game (something I thought made Plague Inc. fun) while balancing visual clutter was a challenge in and of itself

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm pretty proud of the thumbnail I drew for this devpost. The complete, polished game is cool too.

What I learned

I learned how to use garage band to cut audio for the background music (it's the instrumental version of Vintage by NIKI).

What's next for Host a Hackathon Simulator

Better art! I want to redo all the sprites and map in my own style. Also polishing up the UI to be even clearer. My end goal for this project is something that's even better and more addicting than Plague Inc.