Congrats on the win! Totally agree.
I was gunning for best game app as well, so I did a pretty thorough “competitor analysis”. I did consider PenApple one of my favorite submissions (didn’t spot Outdraw at the time). I was hoping to outrun you on the scoring; I put in a day or so into accessibility lol.
My strategy was casting a wider net, maximizing score, and playing the odds. Creative prize, game, android, firebase. Technically, I might have one of the better task list apps in the competition, arguably better than Vite Vere, but the video did not sell that. Congrats to Guido and his team for nailing that. But I was basically pulling in the direction of both impact and games and not quite scoring the #1 in either. Can’t play the odds in a global competition with a large prize pool.
100% agree on the trailer strategy. This was mine:
I think it was pretty catchy, but in retrospect, I wish I spent three days on it instead of one lol.
I brainstormed too much, implemented too much, and burned out a lot.
IMO, this might have been why you did well. I joined a bunch of other hackathons after Gemini, and often played it safe and delivered everything as planned. But often lost to more inexperienced people who went absurdly over scope. I do think subtle animations in the demo count for a lot of points.
I tried using LLMs as a sort of “world model” - they’re impressively great at that, but sometimes hilariously bad. Got to say though, Gemini Flash really impressed me!
Gemini Flash is incredibly good on “rendering” tasks - writing descriptions, dialogues, etc. I might have been a little obsessed with showcasing its writing ability. I spent the first two months on ‘superhero high school’ and it did a pretty good job handling things like relationships and superpowers. But I scrapped that because “impact” and because text-based games don’t make for good demos.
Anyway, congrats! Let me know if you want to make AI games together; it’s so hard to find people who enjoy making both games and working with LLMs.