Hack in The North : Hackathon
By Asim Krishna Prasad
Posted on 23/04/16
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Random
This post is really late. It's last week of my this semester and I had to complete all my assignments and projects and stuff, so was a lil occupied .
We participated in this hackathon organised by IIIT-Allahabad. This was my second hackathon and this time the story goes like this.
I got to know about the hackathon through facebook. The registration was individual and it was to be confirmed by a response invitation from the host college. So I registered and waited for the response. I got the invitation and so did some of my seniors, which included Prashant Baisla, with whom I had attended my first hackathon. We were not too sure about the team size, so we decided on making a team of three by including Satya Prakash from final year.
One day prior to the opening day of the hackathon, we three met and had a good 3-hour long discussion on what were the topics with which we, as a team, were comfortable with. We also discussed some ideas which we could implement in case the hackathon turns out to be open. After all the discussions there was one idea which really struck all three of us. It was about making a game on a desktop which could be controlled using an android phone. We decided on making something around this idea if we got a chance.
The next evening we left for the venue. Though one might say that it's not too far but it was really tiring. I had an interview on the same day so I was a little short on sleep. On reaching we registered on-site and got our rooms. We were a large group from our college, so the whole phase was very entertaining. Being junior in the group makes the situation funnier at times. You get to see everyone picking on everyone except for you. There was a good participation from second year of our college too.
After a light dinner we went to the auditorium where the event was officially started. They announced that the hackathon was going to be open with no restrictions on topic, good news for us.
After collecting our LAN wires we moved to the lab which was alloted to us for next 36-hours of coding. Our whole group took a corner of the lab which also had mattress with pillows and every comfort. Our team secured three tables just beside the mattresses, for strategic reasons ;) . Once we settled and our internet connection got stable, we started making our idea more concrete.
We started with making the idea of the game clearer. We decided on making a game with multiple user-controlled-cursors which would be able to shoot bullets. Every user will have to defend his castle. Every cursor will have a life-bar, every castle will have a life-bar and cursors would respawn after death as long as their castle is intact. The game would run for a fixed amount of time and after that a winner would be decided based on a formula. We listed all the features we wanted in our game, we also decided on some extra features that we might add if we got time.
Once we had solidified our idea about the game. We discussed a little about the controller too. We decided on making the controller generic. I was to work on the game so I started implementing the idea. I had to attend one algorithmic contest in the same tech-fest of the host college so I was working fast with an aim to complete the majority of work in first 12-hours of the hackathon. All three of us stayed up all night. The bottle-neck for us was the controller as all three of us were less experienced with android development, and we struggled the whole night in implementing even the basic stuff in android.
The whole idea of the game was cool but once I started coding up the navigation part, it became a pain. To move the image at a certain angle and maintaining the bullet direction were two main problems. I took resort to some maths and solved these problems, though they took a great deal of time.
By morning I had the basic structure of the game ready. We were ahead of our schedule so we relaxed a bit, had breakfast and took some sleep in the lab only. That noon I went for the contest while both my team-mates continued their work on android-controller. Contest ended late that evening.
So, we were almost 24-hours into the hackathon, we had a basic structure of the game ready and android controller was coming out fine as well. We now started working on the looks of the game. We replaced the cursors with images of tanks, and we included some electric walls, borders and background etc.
After all this, we analyzed our game and we decided on removing some of the functions we had decided earlier. We removed the whole concept of castle and the game was just to kill the other players as many times as possible and get killed as less as possible. We designed the score screen and finalized the connection and server set-up. We finished almost everything by morning and we still had some 5-6 hours before the end of coding phase. I started working on cleaning the code and implementing some extra features. While I was doing that, my team mates made the presentation and all those stuff we needed to present on stage. We faced some issues while uploading the project on hackerearth.
The coding phase ended and we went to the auditorium for the presentation phase. Since we were a little early than other teams, we got a chance to give a mock presentation on the stage.
The presentation phase started, every team started presenting one after another, their awesome projects. On our turn, as soon as we started the presentation, the judge of the event asked if he could play the game, so the 6-minutes alloted to us for the presentation was spent in him playing the game and asking a few implementation based questions about the game. After the presentation we realised our project was not uploaded on the hackerearth for evaluation, so we had to rush things to upload everything on time.
After all the presentations were over, we headed back to our college. We got back by 8-pm which made it an 48-hrs event for us.
So, to conclude this post, I enjoyed this hackathon a lot as it made me break from my regular routine of college, which is really boring, and we coded like insane those 36-hrs. I got to learn a lot from my senior team-mates who were really supportive and helpful, so were all the other seniors who went with us. All-in-all this was one hell of an experience I would remember for a long time.
.... and yeah, we came first ;) .
The link to our project.
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