My experience in The Racoons hackathon 2023

To start off, this was a hackathon hosted by the Latvia University Computer Faculty student council with the support of sponsors and partners. While it was meant for high school and university students, there were others “of age” there that participated.

The experience in the event outside of hacking

The food at the venue was plenty but the location could have been better as the nearest large store was quite a bit away, that staff were amazing to us (the participants) and the judges and mentors were very friendly. Sadly (or luckily) my group didn’t have much use for the mentors but when they came up to ask how our project was coming along they were very friendly and saw that we weren’t running in to much trouble. The other participants seemed friendly enough, except for one man (seemingly in his 30s or 40s) who kept bothering my teammates to come smoke with him and seemed drunk after the first night.

The project

Now to the juicy part. Me and my team initially were aiming for the Sustainability and Data challenge, but since we were running in to a wall with how boring all of our idea were, we switched to game dev and started making “Mental Chess”, as the challenge specified of focusing on mental health awareness.

The proposal

I proposed this idea “Since we all play chess to some level and enjoy the game, lets create a superset of chess rules that give the game a bit of new charm and raise awareness about the impacts of mental illness”, and after some talk about the proposed rules we got to work, one of my teammates got to work creating the basic website in react and a small backend to handle the websocket connection between players, the other (Gustavs) got to work making the pixel art for the chess pieces, and i worked on the new rule set and design ideas.

What problems did we run in to in the process

• The pawn movement we problematic as not only is its movement odd (it can only move forward one spece unless it is its first move in which case it can move two spaces) but ther is also “En pessant” where if an enemy pawn moves two spaces and lands next to your pawn you can take it as if it had only moved one space
• There were some minor networking issues, where initially we trusted the client to have accurate time on their browser to an accuracy of about 2 seconds, but that was a very bad assumptuin as one player turned out to have a clock 2 min in the future
• We sadly ran out of time to test everything properly, and because of the mental illnesses being implemented later then the base game, that including the check mate, in some cases you could take the enemy king and the game would continue

The pitch and results of the project

In the end the pitch got recieved well and our Mental Chess took first place in the GameDev challenge, which won use 500 EUR to share and each a free spot as an intern in their game studio, but since i dont plan on entering the game dev field ill sadly not be taking them up on it, even tho it sounds like a wonderful oppertunity.

You can watch me pitching the game here and the results announcment here.

The project can be viewed here as well, and the devpost submition can also be viewed here.