The First Games.JS Hackathon Bulgaria

The hackathon was organized by a new community which gains popularity every day – GamesJs Bulgaria.

They are a group of game developers seeking like-minded gamers to share resources, techniques, and projects for game development with web technologies.

Part of the group are people who work for us and started the community voluntarily. As a gaming company, we encouraged the initiative by hosting their first event and sponsored the prizes. Special thanks to all other companies who supported the event and made the hackathon an even greater experience – thanks to Wacom for the super cool tablet, a special prize for the best designer, SoftUni for the media support, and Dominos, Boom Burgers, Galactic Banica and Red Bull who took care of the participants all way through!

The GamesJS hackathon happened in 48 hours in our office. The topic was announced at the start of the hackathon and the topic was “Bad Luck”. They had to develop a web-based game.

These were the rules:

Develop a game in a team of 2-4 people.
Playable versions of games must be uploaded publicly (Github, Bitbucket, etc) sharing all code and assets used.
Over 80% of the game’s code must be developed on-site.

The criteria for the judges were:

Functionality
Innovation
Intuitiveness
Cross-Platform/Responsive
Quirks and Features
Theme-related
Effort
Bonus points for original assets, sounds, 60fps, multiplayer

We had a 6-star Jury to assess the projects – Alex and Filip, the prominent organizers of Sofia Game Jam. Emil Atanasov – owner of a mobile development consulting company in Sofia and a lecturer at the Sofia University, two of the founders of VueJS Bulgaria – Hristiyan and Dobri, and the organizer of the famous HackTues – Dimitar.

During the hackathon, we organized a special entertainment – 4 presentations on game development related topics. Top game developers shared their every day work experience with the participants.

You can see the presentations here:

For 2 days we slept оn bean bags, chairs, tables and had breakfast, lunch and dinner together to work on our projects and at the end of the 48 hours, the Jury had the difficult task to assess and evaluate.

The teams presented projects at the end with technologies mostly used – frazer, javascript, unity. The competition was huge as the projects were all good. With less than 2 points the winners were announced: