In order to keep work fresh and fun we try to periodically set aside some time to hack on side projects. We went around and ask everyone who participated to give us an overview about what they accomplished.
First up is Blain…
I finally completed a pet project I’ve been meaning to finish. It is a static file vanity URL service. It was built with Node.js. Feel free to fork and contribute to it: https://github.com/blainsmith/wicked-short
I also started on a todo app called “Icebox” that lets you throw todo items into it, but it only pulls out a random one to complete every time. The idea behind it is that if you have a spare 15-30 minutes you can fire up the app and give yourself something to do real quick. When you complete items it gives you a random number of Gold Stars as a prize. This works well for low priority things to do that you don’t want to forget, but don’t need to do right away. Think of things like take the car to the car wash, clean the stove, vacuum.
We talked to Seth next…
Between client and internal work, I never really get the chance to fully use this beautiful 22HD Wacom tablet. So, for my hackathon project, I decided to take the time and illustrate a new badass promotional poster. The theme of the poster is simply “kick ass and look good doing it” with the GL0-R3 bot at the helm. I mean, who doesn’t like a giant robot crushing alien skulls?!
Erik spent his hackathon working on Howlat, a new alpha product emerging from the ultra secret MadGlory skunkworks. If you didn’t catch that: A new project nearing alpha release which you may want to sign up for.
Here is what he did:
I worked on making it simple for people to hop into Howlat and get to work. This involved familiarizing myself with git submodules, which I had never used. I created a new git repo called howlat-dev that a Glorylord can clone, which contains a Vagrant box that will act as their isolated development environment. It has all the prerequisites to develop and run both projects locally, without the need to muck around installing them on your own machine.
I also began to get a #######[redacted] server running in that same development environment (so we don’t need an external connection), but due to an issue with it not sending CORS headers, I was not able to get that running properly.
Then Kirk gave us his updates…
Worked with Clay, Josh, and Seth to create a multiplayer game on the web, MGBots (another project taking shape in the MadGlory skunkworks). We used Impact.js and Impact-Core.js to accomplish this. I focused on developing the game within the Impact.js framework while Clay was focused on wrapping it with Impact-Core.js and pushing it live. Josh built the animations used in the game while Seth worked on the background images used to build the level. Both Josh and Seth helped come up with a level design. We first built it as a very simple standalone local game and then moved it to a server/client multiplayer setup.
Clarke was doing a documentary of the event…
A hackathon allows people to work on anything they can imagine, as long as it is tangentially related to MadGlory. Because of this liberty, it can often be difficult to document the work being done by the team. For the first time at MadGlory, we tried to record video of the atmosphere, team, and projects being developed. We used Seth’s Go Pro to capture conversations, coding, demos, and some team building. I plan to edit this down soon to a couple minutes of highlights, of course, with some cool music. Check back to our blog often for updates!
Josh spoke to more designing…
Between building character sprites and illustrating pixel robots, I designed and defined a few of the Howlat features. Instead of having a login specific page, a landing page for Howlat and its features was created to either prompt the user to sign up, or prompt the user to sign in – which would replace the marketing page with the web app.
Lastly, Kris gave us what he did…
I wanted to get a dev environment setup for Howlat, preferably a Vagrant box. Erik set to work on it Thursday night and by early Friday morning we both had it running. While Erik was working on setting that up, I got my head wrapped around the architecture for Howlat. Win.
Secondly, I needed to crush a big couple of days for Yvolver, and made a lot of progress on that Thursday and Friday. Win number 2.
As you can see we got a lot accomplished as a team. We plan to schedule these more regularly so we can keep making awesome shit! Keep checking back for more details on future hackathons.