The Office Hackathon

You're a burnt-out intern at MegaCorp Inc. The company hackathon just started. Winner leaves early Friday. Loser does everyone's code reviews for a month. Go.

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The Office Hackathon

Inspiration

I've been there drowning in Slack pings, dreading the Monday standup, watching the office Karen patrol the floor like she owns the place. The Office Hackathon was born from that very real, very relatable burnt-out intern energy.

When I saw the Maki Hackathon 2026, I didn't want to build just another demo. I wanted to tell a story one where you are the underdog intern who has to survive the corporate gauntlet, collect enough coffee to function like a human being, and somehow ship a project before Chad steals your thunder (and breaks the build).

The stakes? Simple. Win and leave early Friday. Lose and do everyone's code reviews for a month.

What It Does

The Office Hackathon is a 3-chapter 2D pixel RPG where you play as Dev, a sleep-deprived intern fighting for survival and early Friday sign-off.

  • 🏢 Chapter 1 : The Office: Dodge Karen (HR) across the office floor while collecting 5 coffee cups. She gets faster with every cup you grab. Escape through the locked door before she files a formal complaint against your soul.

  • 💻 Chapter 2 : The Hackathon Floor: Survive a 3-minute countdown, dodge falling Code Review Piles and Chad's passive-aggressive projectiles, grab energy drinks to stay alive, and hit that SUBMIT button before time runs out.

  • 🚪 Chapter 3 : The Escape: Face the final boss the Monday Morning Standup, a giant sentient calendar. Catch falling coffee grenades, hurl them at the boss, survive a rain of Action Items, and walk out that exit door a winner.

A full scoring system with ranks (S through C), procedural chiptune audio, typewriter-style dialogue, and a proper win screen with credits round it all out.

How I Built It

The game runs on Phaser 3 for rendering and game logic, with the Maki framework handling scene and map management. The dev server is Vite 5, keeping iteration fast.

I deliberately avoided external audio files all music and sound effects are generated at runtime using the Web Audio API, giving it that authentic GBA chiptune feel without adding a single .mp3 to the repo.

The project is structured around dedicated scene files each chapter lives in its own scene (OfficeScene.js, HackathonFloorScene.js, EscapeScene.js) with shared systems like DialogueSystem.js and SoundManager.js used across all of them. Everything is vanilla JavaScript with ES Modules no TypeScript, no extra frameworks, just clean and readable code.

Challenges I Ran Into

Karen's pathfinding was trickier than expected making her feel threatening without being unfair took a lot of tuning. She needed to feel like a real chase, not a rubber-band mechanic. Balancing her speed scaling (from \(76\text{ px/s}\) to \(140\text{ px/s}\) across 5 coffees) so the tension builds naturally took several playtesting iterations.

The boss fight required careful design to stay fun under pressure — syncing the grenade spawn timing, projectile waves, and blocker zones so Phase 2 feels genuinely harder without becoming frustrating.

Getting the procedural audio to feel cohesive across three very different chapter moods — office dread, hackathon chaos, boss fight intensity was a creative challenge I hadn't fully anticipated when I started.

Accomplishments That I'm Proud Of

  • ✅ A complete 3-chapter game loop with a proper beginning, middle, and end
  • 🎵 Procedural chiptune audio with no audio files whatsoever
  • 😰 Karen as a genuinely scary NPC playtester feedback confirmed "I actually panicked"
  • 💀 A boss fight that has two phases and feels earned
  • 😂 Dialogue that made multiple playtesters laugh out loud ("I printed the form in color!!")
  • 🚀 Shipping it. The irony of submitting a hackathon game to a hackathon was not lost on me.

What I Learned

Building a multi-scene game in Phaser 3 with the Maki framework taught me a lot about scene lifecycle management keeping shared state clean across chapters without leaking memory or event listeners was something I had to be deliberate about from early on.

I also learned that game feel lives in the small details the screen shake when the boss takes a hit, the door flashing green when you've finally collected all 5 coffees, Karen's quip text floating above your head when she's closing in. These weren't in the original spec; they emerged from playtesting and made an enormous difference.

And honestly? Scoping is everything. I had bigger ideas more chapters, a multiplayer leaderboard, animated sprites. Cutting to the fun core early is what let me actually finish.

What's Next for The Office Hackathon

  • 🎨 Proper sprite animations for Dev, Karen, Chad, and the boss
  • 🌐 An online leaderboard so you can prove to your coworkers that you are the S-rank intern
  • 📱 Mobile touch controls so you can play it during your actual standup meeting
  • 🏢 A Chapter 4 The Performance Review because the suffering never truly ends

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