The results are in: the first ever Betable Hackathon was a huge success!
Over 60 hackers spent this past weekend building games on Betable’s real-money gaming platform. The event was great, but the real story is the awesome hackers that were there morning ‘til night. We were impressed both by the dedication of the teams and the high quality of games that were produced in just two days. We’ve highlighted the winners below, and some of the other teams that were building some really cool stuff. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who came out! See the list of winners below.
Grand Prize – Real-Money Carnival Games
Brothers Cesar and Edgar Miranda won the Grand Prize for their game: Real-Money Carnival Games. Their first game in what will be a suite of carnival games was a betting version of a classic crane game, where players could wager up to $1.00 to potentially win money if the crane brings back a prize. The game’s high production quality and unique take on our games of chance product netted them the top prize: a trip to Vegas, $10,000 in Betable game liquidity, $5,000 in distribution credit from Flurry, and $5,000 in distribution credit from Tapjoy. See below for a picture of them holding their prizes:
Second Prize – Big Fish Aquarium
The second prize was won by Mario Izquierdo, Victor Mendiluce and their friend Kyle for their game: Big Fish Aquarium. This game was an economic simulation game masked as a FishVille-style aquarium game, where your goal is to amass the most valuable aquarium of fish as possible. The cool thing with Big Fish Aquarium is how they adapted our real-money platform to fit right into the gameplay: you pay (buy in) for each fish egg, and it has a chance to die or hatch into a fish (the payout). Each fish has variations that are rare and more valuable, and the player is awarded cash equal to the value of their new fish. For a cool abstraction of our core gambling mechanics into a social game, we awarded them $5,000 in Betable game liquidity and an iPad 3 for each team member! You can see a picture of them presenting their game below:
Most Innovative Prize – Gambling Bugs
What was most incredible to us was the number of creative, unique ways that people extrapolated Betable’s existing real-money game mechanics into entirely new games. One team, headed by Ina Yosun Chang, build an augmented reality spider dueling game, which uses Betable’s API to power the combat sequences and determine the winner of the bet. For their awesome use of our platform, the Gambling Bugs team got an iPad 3 for each team member! Check out a picture of the game in action below:
Honorable mentions
Tweet Chance
One of the crowd favorites at our event: Play roulette via Twitter! Once creator Ryan Gerard authorizes your account, you can tweet “@tweet_chance bet {$amount} on {numbers, even, or color}” to play for real money over Twitter.
What Happens in Bangkok…
This team of five met at our event and built a real-money powered adventure game inspired by Pokemon. UX/UI designer Renata was liveblogging the process Friday and Saturday.
Simple Slots
With a team of nine people working remotely from as far away as New York City, Simple Slots put together a beautiful slot machine for iOS over the weekend.
Scratch n’ Win
One man built a beautiful, ready-for-live scratcher app in a weekend, showing how easy it is to quickly build and launch a game on our platform.
Ultimate Racing
This team built a car racing game where the player bets on their car racing around the track against CPU opponents. Not unlike the choreographed races shown between innings at AT&T Park, this racing game had the audience cheering for Blue.