Making of…

Quiz-Beat (Lite!)

Meet Nom!

… our protagonist in this flash-card learning app, integrated inside a rhythm game!

It turns something boring, like learning a set of definitions or a new foreign language, into something fast paced and entertaining to encourage the user to continue playing.

The Turbulent First Hackathon

This project actually started as a team of four.

The start of this really shows my own inexperience more than anything (if you want to skip to the hackathons where I know what I’m doing and took charge from the start, try Specu-Scoper 5000 or Memory Garbage Collection.)

Our team was somewhat thrown together from a chain link of “I know this guy” and “I have this one classmate”s, and I met two of the members for the first time on the competition floor. I was nervous, I was, but I figured we’d have what it takes. We had a backend developer, a frontend developer, an artist, and me, whatever it is I could do (fill in whatever blanks there were, probably—) and I was there just for kicks, at that point. We were all just college freshmen, and expected to be small fry in the big pool.

After awhile of bickering, mostly over scope and vision, though, my suggestion of an edutainment rhythm game about eating things— think Quizlet meets Hungry Hungry Hippos— came to be our pick. I was confident on being able to deliver it; I knew what the process would take, and how to pace ourselves; I’ve made many small projects in the past and am experienced in rapid prototyping. I drew up a paper prototype, explained the idea, and we got to researching.

And yes, I did use Kirby as a point of inspiration for how we wanted the mouth emphasized on our creature, though we did also mention for it to kind of resemble a loose-jawed dog.

We had to hop to it, and fast.

I scoped down our concept, cutting out ruffles in our idea. Nom growing bigger and evolving into different forms when getting correct and incorrect answers? Scrapped. Ability to upload your own music and choose bpm? Scrapped. We were going to start from the minimum viable product and build it from there. We also decided to use hiragana as the default set, since they were spatially compact.

I asked the coder to create code snippets for the dictionary incorporation and hitbox determination, and provide me documentation on how to use it. I gave the artist tasks one at a time and provided feedback: the bite animation needs to be frame 2 to be responsive, not 5; the background and non-interactive assets should be de-emphasized; thank you, the bell is perfect. I checked in on their progress often and made sure everything was within reach for their skillset.

While they did their part, I began the assembly. First on the animated prototype, then on the final visuals. I put all the modular bits trickling into our Discord channel together. (And yes, we did it in Scratch— we had little time, and it was the only engine both I and the coder used— and sometimes we make do! I like Scratch, anyways.)

In the end, our working prototype took only 3 hours to make. Check it out!

I made the animated prototype while…

waiting for the results to shake out about spontaneously learning JavaScript for the Hackathon. Our developers couldn’t agree on what language or engine to use, and as the hours went by things started looking a bit grim. We weren’t making any progress, and though I didn’t want to step on the toes of strangers who didn’t ask to be bossed around by me, I could tell there was going to be an issue: the gamefeel. A rhythm game needs snappy, reactive juice. We were going to need a lot of time to nail that polish, and we can’t simply budget our time as if this would be one-and-done. We started at 4 PM, but it was already nearing midnight, and all we had was a ripped bit of code from a JavaScript platformer, with no project in sight. One of the coders got discouraged and turned in early, going home to sleep, and didn’t show up the next day.

However, the other two stayed with me, and I decided to take charge. We would do this, we would just need to get this done in not 16, but 8 hours.

First Working Prototype

Excuse the vertical footage, as a college freshman I didn’t expect my phone videos for my own memories and love of the process to show up on my future portfolio site, haha

Editing Timing…

This chunk took 4, 5 solid hours of testing while the other two went to bed. Pretty bad use of time, all given— they had nothing to do in the time I tweaked the timing and implemented the sound effects and music. I made sure never to make that mistake in the following years though.

Graphics Implemented!

Almost There!

The Final Presentation

Somewhat unexpectedly for many of my freshman friends participating in this hackathon, I’m used to tabling, networking, and presenting my work. I’ve got lots of experience tabling for clubs, for charities, and Artist’s Alleys at conventions. Welcoming people over to check out our stuff and giving them a warm and simple introduction is my bread and butter!