Game UIT Hackathon 2022 - the biggest joke of the year

What is Game UIT Hackathon?

In short, this is a 24-hour contest about making a game following a given theme. Only the top 10 teams will be chosen for a final presentation of their product so as to decide the overall winner and other prizes. Somehow, this year, there was a cagetory for Web Application as well, which makes no sense considering the name “Game UIT Hackathon”. The Game and Web App categories would be judged under the same criterias as well with no dividing into different boards or anything like that. Tons of red flag were shown to my face but due to the love for making games, I gathered a team of 5 sophomores under the name of Xelvis64_0 and the rest is history.

Preparation phase

A few days before the contest, we had an offline meeting to discuss what tools we’re going to use, what ideas we had on our mind and how we were going to actually make the game. The roles in the team are as follows:

• One writer: Write the main plot and all the needed text for the game (This was me)
• One desinger: Design the game’s UI.
• One audio guy: Implementing necessary audio.
• Two game devs: Developing all the in-game mechanics.

The themes given by the contest were Environmental Protection, New Normal (after Covid-19) and Be Together, only one of which would be chosen to be the judging theme. I came up with the idea that we should go for something that would fit all three so that no matter what actual theme would turn out to be, we could still do it fine. After hours of discussion, this was our final idea for the game - a decision-making card game that took place in mordern times where Covid-19 had just gone by and the player would be the supreme leader of a country trying their best to overcome challenges ahead involving environmental protection, economic plans and uniting the people. Also, the game would be in English as we thought that would score more points. Having agreed upon the game idea, we also had a consensus on the tools and platforms we’re using which were:

• Unity (version 2021.3.14f1) for core game development as well as playtesting
• Visual Studio 2021 for scripting
• Figma for UI/UX design
• Google Drive for file sharing
• GitHub for version control and collaborating
• Adobe Premier for editing music and sound effect (it’s chosen because of its availability not usability)

Hackathon day

This is where the fun begins, well… “fun”.

The first morning

Our team in the morning

It was stated through email that the hackathon begins at 7.30am so me and the boys woke up early that day and arrived at 7.15am. To our surprise, the whole thing got delayed until 8.30am. Very professional, indeed. The theme was revealed by the MC to be Environmental Protection, we didn’t really care anyways since our idea was compatible with any of three. The time was 9.00am, all teams moved to their pre-assigned table with the teams name on it which was pretty cool. We wasted no time and immediately did some initial tasks to get the ball rolling: Me and another guy would write the plot for the game (now focused more on the envrionment), one guy would go finding the theme song for the game, one would design the start menu and one would go through open source projects on GitHub that would be best to look at in terms of game mechanics.

The afternoon

We had lunch and a 30-minute break at 11.30am, the food was okay. After that, the work continued. We had a mentor as well, each team had one, but he did’t help too much so there’s that (he was likable though). As the set up was complete, we moved on to new tasks. Two guys were working with Unity to get the core mechanics done, one guy were designing the main UI for the game, one guy was writing the text for the decision cards and I was responsible for translating them to English while helping the design guy with the game’s logo. The game was starting to take shape and things were looking promising so we had another lunch-break at 3.00pm.

The evening

It was announced that in the evening, there would be one Facebook post for each team to promote their game. The likes from the post would contribute to a portion of the final score and the team with most likes would have a seat in the top 10. Our attention shifted to marketing the game now. We named the game “Green Constitution” and finalized the logo.

They said 6.30pm was the deadline for submission for the promoting post so I was very stressful with it since the time was rather strict on my end. I made it in time anyways. But here’s the thing, the clock hit 7.30pm and there were no posts on Facebook. We thought “Oh, maybe just a short delay of 10 minutes or so” and we couldn’t be more wrong…It was 8.30pm and still NOTHING. I went to see the staffs and this was the answer I got: “We are waiting a little bit more so all teams submit their post in time”. I could not believe those were the words I heard. This was supposed to be a contest, not some class assignments, the teams that didn’t make the deadline should be ignored. Waiting for them not only made early submission pointless but also put the early teams at a disadvantage due to them wasting time making the post and not the game itself.

After more teams made their complaints like me, they finally posted on Facebook. Here was our promotion post:

We spent an hour or so calling for likes and shares from our friends and relatives. The final number was over 200 likes and over 150 shares, we were pretty proud of it.

The late night show

10.30pm, done with the post and back to working on the game. This period of time was probaly when all the troubles began. The main dev guys couldn’t make the random cards with our intentions of having 5 important cards that drive the story forward. The designer was struggling with finding the appropriate assets as free and high quality PNG format was considerably rare. The writer was basically out of idea for new cards so I went to help.

The team during midnight

It’s 2.00am now, the team was tired but none could sleep. For some reasons I could not fathom up until now, the judges decided it would be the time to go around evaluating. Like in what world is 2.00am the time for judging let alone in a 24-hour hackathon. One would say that they were juging the team’s performance rather than the game but why not do that in the afternoon or early evening, why 2.00am. I was not in the best state of mind but I did manage to answer their questions about the game.

The second morning

8.00am was the deadline for submission of the game via GitHub. We had some problems with pushing it to GitHub since the size of the commit was too large, we solved the issue in the end with some workarounds and deleteing libraries. The judges came to evaluate once again. I was presenting for a very lengthy duration of 2 minutes and they walked away, not listening anymore. If time was limited, they could have given me a heads-up so I would prepare for that. Not here, I guess, just straight up not saying anything and then disappeared. Such politeness was shown there.

The final result were announced shortly after that. Believe me, you could not tell a better joke than the result of that day. Over-promising, lacking of actual feature or even funtional ones and overall unrealistic ideas were chosen to be the top 10. It was as if they chose the idea and not the product.

Conclusion

Although the service for the contestants was done well throughout the hackathon, the final result made the whole thing essentially a joke and a waste of time for anyone seeking to have their product properly evaluated. If you can read Vietnamese and want to know more about this circus called Game UIT Hackathon 2022, read these reviews of mine and other participants.

The repository of our game can be found here: Green Constitution

That is all for this joke of a hackathon.