Building a game for Words Largest Hackathon using Bolt.new

It was the usual Saturday, and I was just scrolling through X(Twitter) and I saw a post from Bolt.new that they are announcing the worlds largest hackathon.

And I clicked on the link and it redirected me to Devpost page and I saw the participants list and it was in 10,000+ so, thought I couldn't win anyways why, waste time.

Then a week or so passes by, and I was also exploring building games for reddit. And I had just built a basic game for the previous hackathon of theirs. And I saw an announcement on Reddit developers discord that they are collaborating with Bolt for the hackathon and that they would award $25k to anyone who build games for reddit using Bolt.

I was always excited about building games and I thought this was the trigger I needed to build it finally.

Before participating in any hackathons I usually check for 3 things,

1. Does the product I am building excites me?
2. Is there sufficient upside for my work? Like is the prize amount enough for my effort?
3. How much time is left and can I build a winning project in this time?

#1 question was a straight yes as I always wanted to build a game.

For #2 question, I check the prize section and it says $25k so, its a yes yes.

For #3 I saw I had 3 weeks left, so it was more than enough to build a basic game which I enjoy.

I follow these process to successfully build a project,

1. Build a checklist of tasks.
2. Have a strict timeline for the tasks.
3. Have a reward after completing the whole tasks.

I built a checklist of all the tasks like this,

Then I started completing each tasks with time constraint to limit myself from doing things which are NOT important.

Also I hired a friend of mine for this who had experience playing games. And I paid him ₹4,000 for his work.

Then I began learning in-depth about reddit Devvit platform which is a platform where you build games for reddit.

For 3-5 days I was just reading every page of Devvit to get to know everything about it.

Also, I was learning about "How to build games" in parallel.

For this hackathon I was supposed to build a game using their template and on Bolt platform. So, I cloned their template to Bolt, did a few prompts and built a simple tic-tac-toe game.

This act of experimenting with the platform gave me the confidence that I could build a much more advanced game.

Then I proceeded to Ideation process.

I was worried that I need a unique idea, but after watching a Youtube video I got to know that all games are just a different version of some other game like Fortnite is just different version of Counter Strike, etc.

So, I installed various games on my iPhone and played every one of them.

And I recently had played a game called Ematchi which Ryan Harris built to showcase the features of Svelte and SvelteKit (You can play that game by visiting https://ematchi.vercel.app).

Basically it is a memory card game where you need to match two same cards.

So, I prompted Bolt to create a game like this, and first few projects were not good, like it was unplayable and some were not what I asked it to do.

So, I read Bolt docs on Prompting Effectively and it changed the whole thing for better.

For Bolt to work as I intended I needed to provide as much context as possible.

So, I noted all the required docs in a notes and then converted those docs to markdown using https://docsingest.com. And I uploaded all these context files to Bolt and prompted it to build me the game. And the result was quite amazing.

You can play the game here, also please leave a feedback on reddit. It helps me a lot.