Last Saturday, just as the DigitalOcean Hackathon had been announced, we hosted a remote hackathon at my company. I had already been thinking about building something for the DO hackathon but couldn't for the life of me come up with an idea that ✨sparked joy✨, so the short 8hr hack on Saturday felt like the perfect breeding ground for some ideas to sprout.

As Saturday morning came I toyed with a couple of different ideas for projects that could utilize the App Platform but I didn't really get that big light bulb moment that you're looking for. Instead, I started fiddling with the JavaScript game engine Phaser3 as a way to do something else for a while. I've wanted to try and build a game in JS for a while but have never gotten around to finishing anything, always becoming frustrated by tooling, me not understanding something, or running into a dreaded m a t h problem 😱

It's moments like these I appreciate the open and supportive community around software development. There are so many resources available for free which without I never would have gotten anywhere at all. To mention a few I used this starter project that helps set up Webpack for Phaser3, this tutorial on building a platformer with Tiled, a free tileset from KenneyNL and tools like sporadic-labs/tile-extruder for issues I ran into.

I won't say I wasn't frustrated (especially when I decided mid through to convert everything to TypeScript because I'm just dumb 😅), but with the motivation that comes with talking with other hackathon participants about our projects, I powered through.

And finally, much to many of my colleagues' surprise I managed to scrape together a sort of functioning game! 🎉 It wasn't a game with a lot of features or very fancy graphics but it works, and I made it!

Without much further ado, here's a very bare-bones version of a game:

https://hackathon-runner-v1-emb3n.ondigitalocean.app

(Control with arrow keys)

At the beginning of this, I didn't have any ideas at all, but after just going with something I'm now at a point where I have so many ideas I want to add to the game. Some of which I've already started working on, but that's for the next post in this series! 🙌