Betable Hackathon: Miranda Bros. Victory Revisited

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This is a guest post by the Miranda Brothers, Edgar & Cesar Miranda, who won the Grand Prize at the first ever Betable Hackathon in July.

Miranda Bros. success in the Betable Hackathon consisted of four challenges: a unique idea, endurance, rapid development, and high-quality production. The idea was manifested about three hours before we arrived at the hackathon venue. We bounced ideas back and forth on how to implement Betable's Real-Money Gambling API to casual mobile games, but wanted to stay away from the more traditional gambling game ideas such as slots, roulette and card games. With this in mind, we brainstormed of places that aren’t normally thought of as gambling venues, and we swayed towards a more family-oriented theme. After an hour, we had a rough outline for the hackathon. The idea resulted in a carnival style real-money gambling game such as a claw crane or skee-ball game. We decided to produce a craw crane as our first game in a suite of Real-Money Gambling: Carnival Games for the hackathon.

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There isn't much time in a hackathon to put together a high-quality production, let alone do all the programming, learn Betable's Real-Money Gambling API, create art assets, and do testing. Of course, we had nothing to start, so everything had to be done from scratch. We split up the work: my brother Edgar studied the backend/Betable API, and I worked on the frontend programming and creation of art assets with Corona SDK’s cross-platform development tool. As Friday night came to an end, we continued to hack back at home, as we knew we would have to continue to hack through the weekend in order to win. I decided to forge ahead Friday night through Saturday morning. With the help of Corona's APIs, I was able to finish the frontend core game play and set all the freshly created art assets in place in just one night.

Saturday morning rolled around and I passed the torch to my brother Edgar. He had studied the Betable's Real-Money Gambling API, had worked out all the kinks and was ready to start implementing. Thanks to the ease of use of the Betable API and Corona’s flexibility, the backend to the frontend game implementation was super easy. By early evening on Saturday, Edgar was finished tying both the frontend and backend together and we rejoiced.

carnival games gameplay

We wanted to be the best game out of the bunch, so from Saturday evening till early morning Sunday, we continued to polish the game. This consisted of more art assets, code, and testing. As my brother Edgar programmed animations, implemented sound, and took care of final details, I worked on polishing the art assets and searched through many online audio effect stores for the perfect background music and sound effects. Our challenge came to an end at 3:00am on Sunday morning. We were finally satisfied with the quality of our product and got some rest, as we needed to present later that day.

Our 30 hours of consistent hacking, art asset creation, and polishing did not go unrecognized. Thanks to Betable's Real-Money Gambling API ease of use, and Corona SDK’s rapid development capabilities, our game won first place! We were awarded the  Grand Prize: a trip to Vegas, $10,000 of Betable game liquidity, $5,000 in distribution credits from Flurry and $5,000 dollars in distribution credits from Tapjoy. You can see a demo of our game here. All in all an excellent hackathon!