EA Hackathon 2014

A month ago, me and a colleague of mine participated in EA's Code Wars (aka Hackathon). We were asked to build a mobile game in 11 hours. There were side quests along the way too where you have to solve a basic coding problem to win a prize. Unfortunately, we were low in man power to begin with so we completely ignored the side quests.

And well, we did not win. We made an Ant game where you were supposed to lay down tracks for the ant to follow (kind of like a Tetris / Side Scroller hybrid). Unfortunately, we were only able to make the ant move in a level. We did not have enough time to program the tracks and we ended up faking a lot of stuff just to have something that we can present to the judges. Yes, I was pretty disappointed with the result as I knew I could have done more if I only prepared ahead of time. But I did learn a lot of things by participating in the competition. And yes, if ever EA hosts another one next year, I'm pretty sure I'll do a better job in winning that thing!

Lessons learned:

1. Scope. If it looks easy enough on paper, it's still complicated.
2. Dev Environment. If you are given 11 hours to code, spending 1/4 of it learning about the dev environment will get you nowhere. Till the competition, I have never used AndEngine. I should have practiced at home.
3. Fake it. If on a hackathon, it is okay to fake a lot of stuff. Don't do it on a real product though.