This Week’s Project. - 006

Winning a Hackathon!

Happy Black Friday to all who celebrate, I'm sure like me you're a bit lighter in the pocket after being pummelled into submission by the never-ending marketing emails.

Last time I updated you all, my studio had just burnt down. This month however, I'm in a new room and pretty much back to it.

I’d been waiting until now to replace a lot of stuff from the studio, so the delivery drivers have been round A LOT. Did I actually score any deals though, with retailers raising prices in the run up, who knows?

Entering a Hackathon.

So over the month of October, myself, Ross and Marc Wakefield decided to enter a Hackathon competition for Meta's Horizon Worlds platform. Hosted by Devpost, it had a massive prize pool of $2.5million split out into different categories. We'd have just over a month to create and develop a game world in order to hit the deadline. And boy it ended up being close.

Developing a World.

We submitted B-KPR a world in which you collect nectar, look after a hive and protect your bees from marauding wasps and hornets. Ross’s concept and Marc’s amazing 3D skills made developing on this good fun. I learned a hell of a lot over the 3 weeks that we worked on it and we really did hit some speedbumps along the way. At one point, the day before submission, Ross’s laptop died and he was the only one with access to publish the worlds, so that ended up being a real scramble to find a way to get it over the line. During that final week, I saw 2am more times than I should have.

B-KPR Trailer

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If you'd like to try out B-KPR, it's available on mobile and in VR and you can follow this link to have an explore. We're still actively working on fixing some of the bugs we didn't manage to get to, so it may change a little from the video above.

​Try it out here!​

Hitting the Deadline.

Once we’d submitted, there was a public vote and then an internal judging round, and somebody who was good at this would have sent out an email and asked you all to try out our world and go vote for us. But I am bad at this, so I forgot. Luckily though the judges liked our idea and execution enough that we came runner up.

Coming second in our category was a pretty huge achievement, with over 1700 people signed up and somewhere north of 300 worlds submitted, being in the top 6 isn’t something we were expecting at all. Between us, I think only Ross had tried to create anything on the platform before and I actually had to go out and buy a laptop to even be able to work on the project, so I was in the hole before we’d even started.

Getting that bag.

So, how much did we come away with then? Well the winners in each category took away $200,000ea which would have been lovely, while the second place worlds (US!) won $80,000ea!

An incredible haul and something all 3 of us really needed with the way the AR industry has been this year. So split 3 ways, $26500 for a months work isn’t too bad at all! Paid off the laptop and then some.

Aaaaand then we received an email telling us that due to tax laws, the US IRS was retaining 30% of the amount. 🫠.

After consulting with my tax lawyer (ChatGPT), we should be able to claim this 30% back but it will take months unfortunately. Cheers Trump.

Either way, a really fun, exciting, educational and knackering way to spend a month. Looking forward to the next one!

Have a festive week,

Liam

✌🏼

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🎵This Week’s Soundtrack

Robyn - Dopamine.

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I am a huge Robyn fan and this is an absolutely massive tune.

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📖 This Week’s Book

​Apple in China - Patrick McGee​

My last real job was working in developing international supply chains for fashion, so you can see why I picked this up. But for the layman, it’s fascinating to read about Apple’s approach to how they go about building their products and the way they may have ultimately been captured by a reliance on certain suppliers.