AthenaHacks 2019
- Alexis Hale
- Jun 24, 2019
- 6 min read
Last year, I attended AthenaHacks 2018 at the University of Southern California. It was my very first hackathon and I attended it with only a semester's worth of coding experience. Walking into it, I didn't really know what it would be like and what I should do; I had no plan. Luckily, some other classmates from my college attended so we all worked together on one project. We played around with the ARCore from Google. I spent most of my time attending the workshops they had organized. I saw stuff like Azure and Unity for the first time. Zynga taught the Unity workshop, which was actually my very first exposure to Unity and ended up inspiring my future work in game development.
After having so much fun at AthenaHacks 2018, I applied to AthenaHacks 2019 the day the application opened. It was the only hackathon I had planned on attending the whole year. Due to some poor planning with work and the timing of the application responses, I nearly wasn't able to make it to AthenaHacks 2019. Luckily, someone from another location offered to take my shift for the day.
And we were off! I arrived at AthenaHacks with one of my classmates who went with me the previous year. I also invited another classmate earlier in the year who was also accepted. This year, I had a bit more of a plan than I had last year. I knew what to expect this time around.
I introduced myself on the AthenaHacks Slack channel, sharing that I was looking for teammates who wanted to make a video game with me using either the Unity or GameMaker Studio game engines. I shared that it was my preference that they are familiar with either of those technologies as I didn't want to use my hackathon time to teach someone the basics. Amy was the first to join my team, but I later found out that when she said she had experience with video game design, she just looked at it, rather than having previously built a game with either engine before. Although this wasn't my preference as far as game development experience, Amy still had other valuable skills to bring to the table. Geneva joined us soon after. She is a video games major so she had experience with game development, but not in GameMaker Studio 2 which we had ended up deciding to use. Luckily, her knowledge easily transferred over.
We set out to planning out project. Amy expressed that she felt like to many games hypersexualized female characters; growing up, there wasn't any female characters to play in her video games. AthenaHacks is a all-female hackathon, so I planned to make a video game focusing on women in some form. Her sentiments aligned perfectly with what I wanted to make during this hackathon. We all got so excited that we had many different ideas to contribute to the project. Because we had less than 24 hours to code this entire project, we ended up leaning towards the simpler versions of our idea since we wanted to have a working prototype to submit and demo for the judges. At my previous hackathons, I mostly networked and attended workshops. For this hackathon, it was my personal goal to finally demo a project!
Before we go into the finalized version of the project we built, I want to talk more about how we got to that idea. After reflecting on how the majority of our childhood games only offered playable male protagonists, we started talking about impostor syndrome and the glass ceiling in a male-dominated industry. This lead to the idea of creating a game where the player progresses vertically upwards, shooting for the stars.
The next idea was to have the player progress vertically, breaking through glass ceilings of office floors. Each floor would represent a level and progressing through a level, meant breaking through the next glass ceiling. Then we thought, okay, we have glass ceilings as an obstacle, but how will we make this game fun? What will the player have to achieve in order to break through the glass ceilings? In response to this, we added the idea of having negative comments float through the office floors and the player would have to destroy them in order to progress. She couldn't let the negative comments from the people around her bring her down, the losing condition for the game.
On the right, we have drawn a tampon in green and a high heel in red. The original intention is that the player would throw these objects at the negative comments in order to destroy them. We wanted to use a tampon and a high heel, typically designated as feminine objects, to destroy the negative comments in order to show the power in them - that being a woman doesn't make one weak.
Now, you can see how many of these ideas made it into our working prototype of the game. Below you can see a demo of one of the two final versions of our game that we presented at the hackathon:
Our game ended up becoming an endless level, where the negative comments spawn from two spawn points on either side of the level. They spawn at an increasing rate, so the game gets harder as time passes. The player can move left, right, jump up, as well as throw high heels in the direction that she is facing. If 3 of these comments hit the player, then it's game over. In order to win, the player needs 200 points. Right now, it's set so that each comment is worth 10 points, so the player would need to hit 20 of the pink speech bubbles.
The speech bubbles display messages conveying feels of impostor syndrome, stereotypes, and sexism. We wanted to put statements that a woman might hear in the office.
Other comments said:
You can't do it
You're so emotional
She's so bossy!
That's good for a woman
Smile more
The player was hand drawn by Geneva and also included a throwing animation that I didn't have time to implement. The speech bubbles with the negative comments were drawn digitally by me, using my handwriting as the font. As far as our other assets go, I'm not sure where they came from originally since Amy put them together. The music was found on a free music site.
The majority of this blog post has been written months later, during my summer. I normally try to write these overviews no more than a week after the event, so I can explain the game in-depth, including all technical details as well as the roadblocks we encountered along the way. Due to the amount of time that was passed, I have lost the more specific information I wanted to discuss.
And now, for my usual overview…
What Went Well
I'm happy that at this hackathon, I got to complete and demo a project for the very first time. I feel like overall the process was pretty smooth. We started by planning out the game, discussing our motivation for making this game, and then set out to make a minimum viable product for our idea while we waited for the hand drawn art assets to be completed and animated.
What Went Wrong
At one point, I was having a hard time getting the projectile spawns to work properly. It probably took me two hours to figure it out. My partners were afraid that our game would end up unfinished so Geneva set out to rewrite the game in JavaScript by forking from our initial project. We both ended up finishing our games on time and we were able to present our game to our judges on multiple platforms.
In the JavaScript version, Geneva was able to implement the frames of the animation she drew for the player throwing projectiles. I wasn't able to implement this due to time restrictions and having trouble with the projectile spawns. Later, I wasn't able to implement the character selection screen because the free trial license of GameMaker Studio 2 I was using had a limited amount of Game Rooms that I was allowed to use and I had reach the maximum limit.
What I Learned
I learned that, for one, I should vet requests to join my team a bit more and asked for more detailed information about one's experience with different technologies. If our third teammate didn't join a few hours later, I would have been left to do all the coding alone. Outside of a hackathon (or if I was ever a mentor at a hackathon), I would be eager to teach someone how to use Unity or GameMaker. Later, I'll have to post about the workshop I taught spring semester of 2019.
I learned a ton about GameMaker Language throughout this event. I spent a lot of my time reading the documentation to figure out how to do what we wanted to implement into our game. All of the games that I have made before this one were done by following along tutorials. To have finally created my own game without the aid of a step-by-step tutorial made me feel very accomplished. It verifies that my approach of working on a bunch of tutorials has successfully furthered my knowledge and allowed me to apply it later.
What to Come Back to
I don't particularly want to add anything to this project as it has been several months since the hackathon. If I was going to add to it, I would add in the throwing animation for the player. The movement also feels very linear and stiff and it could definitely use improvement. I didn't know much about the physics in GameMaker Studio 2, but I will certainly have to learn more about this going forward.
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