On Saturday we all reconvened at the Google Campus at Bonhill Street in London ready for the real work. After various pitches on who we were and what ideas we had, teams formed and Mark joined a great team of individuals to put together a game app. The app was a social fantasy league football game, allowing multiple friends to pit their fantasy football teams against each other during the weekend matches. To add a further interesting element, if you could predict events happening in the game correctly you could win yellow and red cards which you could play against your competitors players to affect their scores.
The game was driven using some old “live” data provided by Stats. Every small activity (such as a kick, a throw in a pass etc) from football games played a few weekend prior to the hackathon were provided. These were played back in real time using the facilities of Pusher and some hastily knocked up Ruby so that they could be consumed by a web server and a IOS mobile app. At the end of the day the team presented and showed an IOS app and web page receiving “live” data and appropriately altering the scores of the players. An excellent effort which secured us second place. All in all a great day!
Aside from being great fun, the day also provided opportunities to network with fellow coders and designers as well as pick up a few more skills, such as Ruby and Pusher.
You can see more information on the original web site and also see a video summarising what happened on the day.