This year, my game development student organization teamed up with several of the school’s others to collaborate on the Hackathon- a 24-hour “cyber” event. I say “cyber” because there was two sections- a capture the flag section and a software jam section. I coined the term software jam- it essentially just means a game jam, but not limited to games. General software was permitted.
This event was different than game jams that I’ve held in that this one was a competition. Even though I couldn’t participate (as I helped create the event), I still wanted to work on a project.
Initially, I was going to program a 3DS game on my 3DS using SmileBASIC. As the name implies, the language uses BASIC. This goal quickly became uninteresting as I had to squint and use a stylus to write lines of BASIC, a language that I (and many others) have not used.
My buddy ol’ pal Ian Cooper, on the other hand, had a fantastic idea- a guitar amp. Essentially, Ian would connect his guitar to his laptop and the sound that came out would have effects, such as gain, distortion, and reverb.
Ian saw my frustration and asked if I wanted to help him. I jumped to the challenge, and had to learn some C++ again. We used the JUCE framework to help us with this project. However, we ran into some road bumps and decided to switch to Python.
We discovered that a lot of the things we were attempting to accomplish were already done in a Python library we found. Ian had frustrations with latency issues, so while he worked on the implementation and latency, I created some UI using the NiceGUI Python library.
I made a pretty okay UI. When the Python program ran, it opened up a browser with the UI. I made a separate branch and pushed my changes, but I failed to make a pull request. This resulted in Ian creating his own UI using tkinter while I slept.
As a result, I ended up contributing nothing to the final project. However! I did help make a music video! Ian recorded a song using the amp, and we came up with lyrics together.
Moral of the story: maybe sleep and study before the Theory of Algorithms midterm (I did have fun, though!).
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