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Is quarantine online hackathons the right time?



A few months ago, we decided to hold an online hackathon for all interested game designers / developers and artists. It was interesting to organize a large-scale event not in the format “we give a week, during which you can do anything you like and then send work”, but a full-fledged hackathon for a day and a half, as usually takes place offline. In general, it worked out - more than two thousand participants gathered.

Against the background of a total transition to a remote site, such an experience may be useful. Therefore, I will summarize some organizational results and talk about how one of the last online hackathons in the CIS went before it became mainstream.

Not so long ago, activities on a remote site could be perceived as exotic. Distributed teams were sometimes confused with freelance or outsourcing, students believed that they would not be able to study productively - although materials on switching to a remote site appear constantly. And now, amid the pandemic, this has become a temporary necessity. I understand that there are areas where you cannot do without a personal presence - but there are fewer of them.

The gaming industry turned out to be one of the most prepared. People from dozens of areas work on games - game designers, artists, programmers, marketers, sound engineers, testers, producers, PM, designers and more. Each area is divided into several specializations - it is not easy to find so many people physically near you and it pushes many to switch to distributed teams.

In game development, the udalenka is already perceived as the company's natural choice - not the only, but one of the options. Hence the idea of ​​conducting a remote hackathon in an atmosphere that is closer to offline.

Training


For understanding, the “lamp” event resulted in 2,400+ registered people, 1,354 teams, 472 submitted works, 330+ user materials and a total reach of more than 5 million users. Suddenly.

It all started with the idea of ​​organizing at the end of 2019 a hackathon for game developers and, separately, artists. According to reviews, a lot of artists were waiting for such an opportunity - their contribution to the industry is enormous, and art games often receive much less attention on game jams.

For a couple of weeks, they made a landing and a separate subsite on the platform about the game, for which 1400+ people signed up for a couple of months. And it turned out due to the activities since the start of the hackathon itself.

First, the question was how the audience will perceive the format, how many participants will be and how the event will be held. Therefore, after the announcement, we decided to hold a “warm-up” weekend mini-jam to give participants an opportunity to recreate, as well as break in technical moments.

The "training" task for the developers was to show the most ill-conceived, paradoxical or non-obvious mechanics. Works sent genius, here are a couple:


Strategy in real real-time: "Before the construction of the barn only a little less than a year, do not turn off the computer." Basketball. Probably. Artists were supposed to draw the weakest character and his remains. Hipster. Soap bubble.












Project Benefits


Hackathon is not an end in itself. Nothing prevents you from closing for 39 hours in the room (especially in quarantine) and making a prototype. But there must be something that the hackathon gives to the industry, in addition to motivation or cash prizes.

Understanding this in advance, we began to produce educational articles within the framework of the hackathon, which would send the participants in the right direction before the announcement of official tasks, plus benefit after the hackathon - they wrote about creating core gameplay, characters, about the mechanics of tutorials and prototyping in game dev.

But it’s obvious that the exchange of expertise in the team is much faster (this, by the way, is one of the arguments of critics of remote work), so we decided to additionally push people towards searching for like-minded people. They made a separate material, in the comments to which the participants left contacts and a portfolio, got acquainted and united in teams. Many published their own posts with the search for the team - they were also added to the collections and it worked very well.



I think this is the best contribution that the hackathon could make to the industry. Who knows what new teams will show in the future if they issued such prototypes and concepts in two days at the hackathon.

Hackathon


The main task was published at 09:00 on Saturday, and work was accepted until 23:59 the next day. For the hackathon, they decided to bring the task as close as possible to the real situation of an independent studio.

The original and creative framework of the “preparatory” task is good, but if you are an indie developer or team, no one will tell you what exactly to do at the start, it's up to you (the only question is whether someone will play this ) Nevertheless, a framework is needed for the hackathon, as the jury has yet to evaluate the projects.

For game designers / developers, the task was to create core gameplay for any game with one condition: it should have replayable, unusual and catchy mechanics. How to achieve this is up to the participants themselves. Genre and style were not taken into account.

It seemed to some that such a framework was the absence of a framework, but if you take a closer look, from the point of view of the game dev, it’s not so simple. Take a visual novel with a linear plot - it no longer fits the conditions. Studios have long struggled with the issue of replayability and come up with hundreds of approaches to lure the player into longer - a good core loop can bring you pleasure again and again, taking just a little time in one cycle (taking the same bagels), which ultimately adds up to tens and hundreds of games hours. This area of ​​game design is much deeper than it might seem at first glance.

Artists had to come up with a game universe and draw three characters for it:

  • Main character.
  • The most enduring character in the game.
  • The antagonist of the main character.

And also two options for one location:

  • — .
  • — , . , , , , .

Such a task demonstrates well the skill of artists (it turned out to be much higher than we expected) in the context of game development, because it reveals an understanding of some principles of game design. Surprisingly, many did not just do the rendering work, but also thought out the ENT of the game in which their characters would be.

It is very important that art and game design go together, complementing and improving each other - and not just do their work “as they see it.” We hoped to convey this implicitly through the assignment.

And in order to avoid subjective final assessments, they gathered a diverse jury of eight industry experts and did not limit themselves to company representatives only.

All work was contributed to an Excel table with links to prototypes. The jury put down marks on a 10-point scale and left comments with a brief description of the gaming experience.

In total, more than 450 entries were submitted, so the voting took place in several stages - first they selected the top 50 from each nomination, then the top 20, top 5 and, finally, the winners.

Given that some of the games were for PC, part for Web and part for mobile platforms, it becomes clear why the calculation took us not two weeks, but two months. And if we add games to which we simply stuck here, and projects outside the competition (for example, a skill for Yandex.Station), then the calculation is extended for a couple of days.

Participants and winners


There were no particular disputes regarding the winners. Each met a work, especially sunk into the soul, but the average score showed the exact winners, albeit with a slight difference.

The second place among the artists was taken by the work “Phagocytosis” with a detailed lore, various forms of character evolution, weapons and a good style. The team approached the work very seriously. A few illustrations:







The first place among artists: the work “House of Memories”, where the main boss is Growing up, caused a sea of ​​very different emotions not only with the level of art, but also with the content. A 100% hit in the heart in all respects - even without a description you plunge into the ENT from the first seconds of your acquaintance, and the longer you look at it, the more details you notice.







Now about the finalists among developers and game designers. Second place: sober loaders simulator - a powerful reference to the famous Overcooked series in the atmosphere. A game for two, when the fan from the process is many times higher than expectations during the first run. Everyone was very pleasantly surprised.


"Yes, you go around the corner with this piano, just do not break."

First place among developers and game designers. When meeting the prototype, the reaction to the description of “one-button boxing” was: “What?” But it turned out very cool, believe me. First you stick yourself, then you watch how others play.



What could be done better (or where we stalled)


It’s not enough to carry out a hackathon, we still have to take into account all the jambs for the future, and we have collected a lot of them.

Firstly, they expected a slightly smaller number of participants, but they should have predicted such a thing. As a result, several processes stalled at once. For example, job evaluation took much longer than planned.

In addition to cash prizes to the winners, we prepared a merch for the top 15 teams in each category and did not take into account the final number of participants. Therefore, as a result, they made the top 30 sets in each of the categories.

A separate difficulty was the collection of personal information for sending merchandise - I did not want to collect a lot of personal data, but without this it would not be possible to arrange delivery to the participants. Therefore, data collection took too much time and we did not manage to predict it.

It was also worth stricter to prescribe the formats of the submitted work. The rules say that accepted file formats are accepted. exe ,. dmg and. apk, but this was not enough - they sent us links to files, the files themselves in the letter, and archives of various formats (which didn’t open everywhere, we suffered a lot, though we were to blame). Even “bare” projects for Unity and incomplete archives were sent, but their percentage was low. It was worth considering this moment.

Terms of participation could also be made more clear. We were constantly asked if people under the age of 18 / from other countries / teams from one person can participate and so on. Transparent and clear rules in a prominent place, but rather a cycle of questions and answers - this is the basis.

At 23:59 on Sunday, a minute before the end of the reception, work, when a lot of people tried to download their work, the servers simply crashed. This is a technical moment, so we continued to accept applications when everything settled down. But still did not expect.

But the main and positive thing that hackathon was remembered for is the high level of submitted works. Everything that happened - from the number of participants to the quality of prototypes and art - turned out to be higher than expected. We hope that the ideas, teams and experience formed during the hackathon will someday be continued in the form of full-fledged releases. We would definitely play it.

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