Preparing for the hackathon

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