VandyHacks IV Submission: The Forest

I know I haven't been maintaining the blog here, but now would be a good time to start outlining the development process of some of my projects, starting with my submission to VandyHacks IV. The devpost submission can be found here.

My team and I (three people in total) were responsible for coming up with a hack in thirty-six hours. We knew going in that we wanted to develop a game since it was our first hackathon and given our team's familiarity with game development. We wanted to do something that most of the other teams weren't doing, so we decided to use Microsoft's Mixer API (details on this can be found at dev.mixer.com). The Forest: A Mixer Interactive Game was born.

It wasn't easy though. We hadn't finished a game in 3D before, so object manipulation in 3D space was a bit new to us. However, most of the issues we ran into involved the Mixer service.

Let me start by saying Mixer's API is a dream to get started with. It was easy to get our project interactive on mixer, and mixer's website provides a nice interface for building controls for viewers. Interfacing with the API wasn't difficult, it was using the service as a developer that was a bit of a pain. Getting out instance of the game connected involved the following steps (in loose order):

1. Having a running game client
2. Having a mixer account
3. Downloading the Mixer API and applying it to the project
4. Creating a project on mixer.com
5. Creating an OAuth client on mixer.com
6. Plugging the project version number and OAuth key into the game client
7. Building the controls in Mixer
8. Implementing mixer controls and functions in the game client
9. Ensuring that the game launches in interactive mode on startup
10. Game displays a code on startup that viewers should enter to gain access

After these, launching the game should let all allowed Mixer users interact with the controls built on Mixer's website. That wasn't always the case. And we could never figure out why. Sometimes it would work, and the viewer would get controls. Other times, it wouldn't work, and we hadn't changed anything from when it did work. No one else was having this problem on the internet that we could find. With little to no information on developing for Mixer, we just had to press the play button and hope.

Aside from that, another barrier we faced was our lack of sleep. I only got three hours of sleep the whole weekend. That's the nature of the beast when it comes to Hackathons.