Developer Spotlight — Meet the Hackathon Winners
On October 1st, 2021, our Community Hackathon took place. It was an exciting collaboration with the Riot Games third-party developers community Discord’s server, in which participants had exactly one month to build an in-game app on Overwolf for their favorite Riot game. We received a lot of great, fully-functioning apps for different games, so choosing the winners was an incredibly tough job.
It was a close battle, but the judges have eventually made their decision: The Project Halo team won 1st place, with their extraordinary app for TFT.
We’d like to share their story with you:
Hi guys. Can you tell us a bit about yourselves?
geo: Hi, I’m geozukunft. In real life, I’m known as Viktor but most people just call me “geo”. I’m 20 years old, and I come from beautiful Upper Austria.
Vivi: Hi! I’m Thomas and I go by the name of Vivi online. I’m 21, from France.
Robin: I’m Robin, 26, from Germany. I go by Nurse or Doctress online, mostly because I spent way too much time playing Soraka.
What are your hobbies and interests?
geo: All of us are into coding and gaming, whether on PC, AR or mobile. Other than that, Robin and Vivi love reading. Robin also likes doing all kinds of side projects, and Vivi enjoys climbing.
How long have you been gaming and what’s your favorite game?
Vivi: We’ve all been gaming for many years now. My personal favorite has to be one of Portal games, geo’s is the AR game Ingress, and Robin’s favorite game is probably AntiChamber.
What got you into programming?
geo: It started out of boredom when I was 9 years old in school, and I guess it just stuck with me since then.
Vivi: Around 2013, I wanted to create a Minecraft plugin for my server, so I had to learn Java. It did not go well in the beginning, but I really learned to appreciate programming.
What initially got you interested in creating content for Project Halo?
Robin: I suggested the idea more as a joke, but it started shaping into something serious pretty quickly. I was looking for a time-limited project, and a hackathon sounded like lots of fun. At a certain point, geo just tagged along. Then Vivi saw us looking for people to brainstorm with, and hopped on as well. He didn’t know us very well at the time, but as active members of the community — he just felt comfortable approaching us.
How did you come up with the idea for the app?
Robin: I like Sankey diagrams and recently learned about how matching in TFT was now allowed to be displayed. So the idea of showing match history along the lines of what Hearthstone Battlegrounds does was quite interesting. Additional data points just got dragged in as a “why not”. The initial mockup wasn’t even that far away from the final product.
For those unfamiliar with the app, can you tell us what the app does and what’s special about it?
Robin: Prototype Halo (name still WIP) is a TFT overlay. It displays recent rounds of combat in a fancy-looking Diagram that shows who matched against who, and who won the fight.
The app also shows the current health of each player, as well as the units currently included on their board. Additional features such as how much damage was done, active traits, and exact positionings of each unit are also planned — but we decided to cut them out for now, to keep it within the limited timeframe.
How long did it take you to develop it?
geo: I wrote the backend, supplying the app with additional player data. It took me around 3–4 days.
Robin: The frontend was developed across 2 weekends, a few evenings, and a week during which I had luckily taken time off. The hackathon duration being a full month really helped, as there were a lot of dependencies between each other and rather different schedules.
Vivi: I was looking for different ways to get other players’ units, but couldn’t find any API available for such a task in Overwolf/TFT. So I actually had to learn how to read the memory of the game in order to get this information. Most of the first 3 weeks were about learning and implementing the memory reading, and during the last part of the month, I implemented it in the Overwolf platform.
What challenges did you face during development? What were your struggles?
geo: Overcomplicating things in the beginning, and overengineering things that could have been done way easier.
Robin: First time working with an encapsulating system like Overwolf is always weird. Streamlabs and Twitch were similar in that regard. The entire visual part was done using a canvas framework called Konva which I had only used in entirely different contexts before, never in conjunction with Angular.
What did you think about the hackathon itself? How would you describe your experience?
geo: It’s the first time I participated in a hackathon that was more than a few hours long, and that didn’t have specific tasks I needed to complete. So it was fun and exciting to try something new.
Vivi: I never used Overwolf much before, but the hackathon made me discover the whole SDK available for developers. Combined with the memory reading, I learned a whole lot. It was a fun and enjoyable experience, I just wished we had communicated more with the other participants. One of the best moments was seeing what everyone had made in the end, some ideas were really inspiring.
What did you take away from the hackathon? What did you learn?
geo: Don’t overcomplicate things.
Robin: Beware of the scope creep.
Vivi: Dare to learn completely new things.
How did you feel when you heard you won first place?
geo: I haven’t felt so happy in a very long time.
Vivi: Really happy! I remember trying to participate in the 2016 Riot API Hackathon 5 years ago, and now I won this one. Time flies.
What are your plans for the future?
geo: As for Project Halo, people can look forward to seeing it soon in the Overwolf store. We are also planning on adding additional features in the near future. As for me, I’ve been working on a personal project that’s related to LoL. It will launch early next year.
Vivi: We have a lot of ideas of features that could make Halo better and more useful, so I plan to work on them. I really appreciated doing memory reading on TFT, so I might also do more projects in this area.
