Breakdown
I drove six hours from Pennsylvania to Boston for HackHarvard. I'd done hackathons before but always locally and usually focused on web dev, which was never really my thing. This time I wanted to make a game.
I ended up finding Jacob Mandelbrot and Aakarsh Singh, and we spent hours brainstorming. Most of our ideas were either too ambitious for 48 hours or didn't fit any of the sponsor tracks. Then Aakarsh mentioned how much trouble he'd had commuting to Harvard, and we started thinking about transit systems. That's when Mini Metro came up, something about it clicked. I showed them Freeways, this indie game I'd been obsessed with, and we started building in that direction.
I didn't sleep for 48 hours, which in hindsight was pretty dumb. We ate a lot of pizza, split up the work, and just built as fast as we could.
The best part of the entire experience was watching strangers play. People would line up, lose a round, then come back for another try. Some of them would actually scream when their traffic jammed up. That was the first time I got to see someone enjoy something I helped make.
Key Accomplishments
- Designed and built all visual assets and UI in 48 hours
- Co-designed core road building mechanic and traffic stuff
- Created readable visual hierarchy for complex overlapping systems
- Shipped complete game that engaged 30+ hackathon attendees