My #WEMAKEDEVS Hackathon Journey
So it all started when I saw a post from Kunal(@kunalstwt on twitter) on thursday (a day before hackathon) that WEMAKEDEVS i.e. our community is having a hackathon so even though I had tons of plans for the weekend like attending the techfest at IIT bombay I had to make some decisions and since you are reading this blog so you know what I chose (hint: Hackathon!)
So I asked some people in my circle to join me for the same, and we made a team of 3 members (including me), the idea was to create a 3D multiplayer game inside a website, we had this idea of using socket.io and using it to send a response that a player has been entered so a new player will be spawned in the map and after a day full of googling stuffs we managed to make it work ! but unfortunately we were stuck while adding controls and handling the camera and it was day 2 of the hackathon i.e. saturday and still we couldn't figure it out and we were about to give up than we got this amazing idea of making a scavenger hunt game to prank the folks ! (not sure how it will turn out though)
I wrote the idea down
Sent it to my teammates
We laughed for half an hour on it
We got the motivation to start again
So now we are left with around 26 hrs and fully pumped up to complete this project ! so we gathered the models, textures and all together and started to work on it, we had no idea how blender works but youtube helped us a lot ! so with it we again started our journey with the modern framework i.e. NextJS (most of us had no idea how it works) so we created a working model but we were getting a lot of issues while deploying it but we were determined to do it since that was one of the priority for our project so we were pushing the code and testing it via vercel(perks of using nextjs, it makes it really easy to deploy even before merging it) so we were checking before merging it that it's able to work on the production or not and that's how we were able to maintain the hosting part.
So now it's the last day of hackathon, we got a feature idea to implement in our project, we already have a MVP but still were thinking if adding this feature will be a good choice or not, so in order to figure that out I sent a msg to one of my friend and just asked him to review it and he literally gave me bunch of more ideas for
Optimization - we were trying to figure out when the player is at a certain position so he gave the idea to just get the position vector of the player and than subtract it with that of that position and when it equates to 0 than we can say that they player is at that position ! and this made me realize how awesome coding really is.
Feedback - With that he gave me some feedback that instead of just finding one block, we can add two blocks just like red pill and blue pill and let the player find the correct one ! and I think that is one of the best part of our project.
So now we had one more idea + a clear vision of what we want, so we started again !
and now we are almost done with our project but it was not this easy, we faced tons of errors in the building process with every error we learned at least 3-5 new things about nextjs
This is just one of the many bugs we had to deal with and the process fixing it was crazy funny !
but creating something like this inside a webapp using nextjs was itself a great achievement for us !
Few more things that I learned from this hackathon is:
How to make a team project interesting + working in a team.
How to face the errors and fix them.
How to figure out and work with a new technology.
Enjoy the process (which I did a lot).
At the end I would like to thank #wemakedevs to organize such a great hackathon ! loved the way other community members were trying to help the participants and were there every single minute when we had any questions.
Thank you !
In order to check the game just click here !