Hack the 90s: a game

Inspiration

This Vine (spoiler alert: involves hacking), and an endless fascination with the depiction of hacking in mainstream media and film.

What it does

Allows you to hack different things, with the relevant code. Just type anything you want and it will turn out to be the right thing.

How we built it

Vanilla Javascript, from scratch. No libraries needed. All beautifications were done in CSS, with inspiration from nes.css, the SystemsHacks website, and relevant background images from GIPHY.

Challenges we ran into

Time and mobile testing. Originally, the project was supposed to include hand animations and custom-themed keyboards for maximum high-budget Vine reproduction, but it had to be scrapped. I also came really late to the hackathon, so I wasn't able to form a team :(

Learning to write funny text for games is also difficult, because I've never had to be funny at a hackathon before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Full mobile compatibility (try it!)
• Wrote some clever text that made demo users laugh (okay fine, lightly chuckle)
• Made it somewhat pretty, not just a bare-bones interface

What we learned

• Every colour palette you 'ever wanted has already been done before
• GIFs make really good background images, especially if your app doesn't really do much
• CSS animations also provide good camouflage for an app that doesn't do much

What's next

• One of the judges/sponsors/organizers/people in charge suggested that this be turned into a game where people compete to wrote bots for "keyboard smashing" (judged by how quickly they can output bogus keystrokes)
• Adding some 90s background music without infringing on any copyright potholes to add to the aesthetic

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• web-audio-(hopefully)