8-Bit Jam
- 2 Devlogs
- 17 Total hours
Online project and judging management platform website for 8-Bit Jam, a game-themed hackathon for high school students happening on 8/22 in Great Falls, VA!
Ship #1
8-Bit Jam is over!!!
- 8-Bit Jam, the game development hackathon I hosted last Saturday, 8/22, in Great Falls, Virginia, is finally over after more than 3 months of hardwork, emailing, worrying, calling, writing, marketing, building, and doing a hella ton of other stuff
(I already said this in my last devlog so I won’t be repeat too much) - Most of this massive 7 hour devlog’s time was spent a few days before the actual event when I was rushing and working on the site for 2 hours per day (on top of emailing sponsors, judges, participants, and preparing for the event) getting the project submission, judging, algorithmic weighing, auth, and other workflows ready for production
- Finished the project submission form by adding a new field for technology used in the project and tooltips explaining what to put in each field (and some people were still confused during the event
) - Judges can now actually submit their ratings for each judging criterion and submit their constructive feedback (at least 30 words) for the project on the judging page
- Added an admin result summary page that only my account can access which displays a table with all the projects’ scores for each category, as well as their overall scores. The scores can be sorted by clicking on each table headers (project names are censored in the devlog for privacy reasons because the event took place and the scores are all real from our 100+ ratings from 12 judges)
- Took quite a bit of time coming up with and implementing a fair and balanced algorithm to calculate each project’s overall scores for the categories since in-person and remote judges are weighed differently. I felt so smart and stupid at the same time for making the final weird algorithm
- Added the winners page after the hackathon showing pictures of winners with their certificate, award, and team name, as well as photo highlights from the event
- Added the logo redesign submission page when the event was happening since I still had some free time in the entire 10 hours, where you can upload your 8-Bit Jam logo ideas that show up on my admin summary dashboard page for the sidequest
- A ton of stuff happened, this was definitely the most fun I’ve experienced in one day in a very long time, and I’m really excited to finally write a blog post about it to organize my wonderful memories of 8-Bit Jam 🥹
- Updated project submission form styling and content
- Updated a lot of outdated info across the website both during and after the event
- Fixed some project form edge case bugs related to AI usage entries and saving projects
- Fixed many other visual and backend bugs to improve overall UI and UX
- Updated README
Preparing for the hackathon
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8-Bit Jam, the game-themed high school hackathon, is finally happening in less than 3 days in Virginia !!!
- I’ve been working on hosting this event, including finding venues, getting sponsors, marketing, contacting judges, improving the website, managing registrations, and doing a hella ton of work along with my team (genuinely took up all my free time this entire summer )
- I already made the basic website with event information listed and a simple account system a while ago near the end of Flavortown, but this time I’m finishing it for the event since it will be used as the project management and judging platform for our participants and judges
- I didn’t plan on devlogging the website on Stardance because I thought it would only take a few hours, but it’s turning out to be quite complicated, so might as well just document everything on here. I’ve been working on this periodically over the past few months and somehow accumulated almost 10 hours, so this devlog will be pretty massive
- Participants can now go to their dashboard and start managing their project information by clicking on the manage project options
- On the project form, they can fill in their project’s name, description, gameplay instructions, demo/repo links, team name, team members, log their AI debug usage (because generative AI is prohibited 🥹 , only debugging with AI is allowed), and upload a banner for judges to know everything about their project
- Judge accounts can see all submitted projects from the dashboard, and clicking on one brings them to the rating page where they can get a comprehensive overview of the project, as well as put their ratings for each criterion and provide constructive feedback in the rubric section (I definitely didn’t take inspo from the Stardance voting page
) - I still need to clean up the database and put dynamic time constraints to make sure people don’t cheat the system, submit early/late, or do something else, so figuring out all the edge cases would be a pain
- Updated the account auth system so signing in/signing up with either credentials or OAuth actually works. Added judge accounts as well that give them access to the project rating dashboard and individual pages
- Updated the website with a lot of new information including our prizes, team members, judges, sponsors, detailed schedule, rules, and a bunch of links for our registration and volunteering forms
- Updated backend database schema and types
- Updated styling and page layout
- Fixed a lot of bugs/outdated info here and there so it’s slightly presentable to the professional audience
- I probably did a lot more on the website that I don’t remember, because managing a hackathon website is genuinely very tedious
