Hack Day - Mobile Games: Game in 2 days

If you want to build good software product, reduce all extra features and leave only essential ideas. It will allow to see real usability of the software. Since most of advices are easy to say but hard to follow, developers invent different practices serving wise approaches. One of such practices is Hack Day well known by people all over the Internet.

This articles describes Hack Day event that took place between January 5-6th in Omsk, Russia. Three companies came together in order to produce brand new games for mobile devices. Being unprepared was important condition for the Hack Day so nobody knew what we were going to work on.

3 teams participated the event:

Lemon Tree Studio: 2 iPhone developers, 1 artist
Al Digit: 1 iPhone developer, 1 artist
Development Mill: 2 Android developers, 1 artist

Early morning we verified all hardware and software and prepared lists of paper with pencils. When team members and staff got together, everyone started writing random ideas of what teams may work on during the day. We generated list of names for main heroes, evil heroes and game locations. All items were placed into hat. Here is what our teams have randomly chosen:

Lemon Tree Studio: Dolphin (evil character), Kolobok (positive one), Underwater world.
Al Digit: Sponge (bad guy), Droid (good little fellow), Kitchen
Development Mill: Gremlin (many of them), Snowflake (our hero), Death Star

After 30 minutes long brainstorming teams got main concepts of the games prepared. Developers opened IDE editors and started from scratch: File -> New Project..., artists began painting. Everyone had to work hard during first day because we felt fear of possible failure. Usually it takes about 1-2 months to produce casual mobile game of average size so making it in 36 hours was a good challenge.

Efficiently working for the first 10 hours we managed to create first playable proof of concept versions. Night time between 2 and 5 a.m. was hardest and not very productive so we decided to order pizza and play football for half an hour. Of course in office because it was 31 Celsius below zero outdoors.

Pizza was too spicy but hungry developers and designers finished it in few minutes. In the morning of the second day we realized that people don’t really need to sleep and game development can replace all other living activities at least during the hack day.

By 10 a.m. Lemon Tree has almost finished their game and worked on artworks cleanup and gameplay adjustments. They have submitted the NoNemo game about Kolobok little adventurer at 1 p.m. and crossed finish line with 27 hours spent in total. Al Digit worked till late evening and submitted Hungry Droid to App Store at 8 p.m. It was 34 hours long working day. As a result we have the next conclusion:

Before starting any Hack Day event think twice about everything you may need, setup two stable internet connections, prepare all software and hardware as well as a lot of food. More food! Nothing should prevent teams from creative work. Inspiration will come if routine is handled.
Hack Day is great opportunity for team building. It’s important to work during the night because teammates overcome difficulties together.
Don’t be afraid of starting from scratch but ensure that you use mastered technology and work on something really useful. Concentrate on main concept and get rid of all optional details.