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5 days ago
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Written by Esther Ward
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At the start of February, I received an email inviting me to join a challenge called Juice. The challenge? Spend 100 hours developing a 30+ minute long languageless game and get a $750 stipend to fly to Shanghai, China, to present your game. I had already been thinking about making a game, so I thought Why not? It wasn’t “The best games get to go,” or “The first 30 people to finish get to go,” or “You get entered into a lottery to go.” It was, “Everyone who completes the challenge gets to go.” Which meant I could make it happen.
I don’t think I ever made a conscious choice whether to make Juice a solo project or a team one. But when I went to school the next day, I couldn’t help but invite my friends to join. This is the team I ended up with:
Esther Ward — Me! Coder, artist & violinist, crocheter, swimmer, pottery enthusiast etc. Needs constant alone time, and lives half of life wearing headphones & listening to music! Loves the outdoors.
Layla Salloum — Twin #1. Graphic designer, animator & composer | Hates sports but rows competitively, 24/7 music listener, enjoyer of old books and orange juice in (specifically) green mugs.
Luca Salloum — Twin #2. Coder, quest giver | violin virtuoso & composer; amateur photographer; tea addict and acrobatic extraordinaire (will run off and join the circus when you aren’t looking).
Peter McNish — Graphic designer, wannabe blacksmith (be careful with the battle hammer in the shed), and track star (?).
The game we made is called Dust and Dawn. Our original idea was a kind of story game where a soot sprite travels around the world helping creatures they come across while also cleaning up the dead/polluted world. I wanted the art style to be similar to a game I’ve played the demo of called Monster Sanctuary (https://monster-sanctuary.com), but with a darker, more haunting vibe. As I made a Pinterest board for the game, I kept seeing artwork with almost exactly the vibe I was going for… all containing a little character with a white skull and a grey cloak. I later learned that I had stumbled upon — as many of you have already guessed — Hollow Knight. Somehow, a game I knew nothing about became the core inspiration for Dust and Dawn.
However, as we got into building the game, both artwork and coding wise, we had to pull back a little on our initial idea. I think the biggest challenge was trying to keep it languageless. Trying to communicate the depth of a lost world is hard enough, without having to use only emojis. Luca and I also had no experience coding a game, so every new feature we wanted to add took hours. Even features as simple as movement, collisions, and background were a struggle. After a few weeks of working, we decided we needed to put the story side of the game on hold. Now that the challenge is over, we no longer need to keep it languageless, so we hope to add the story back into it. In general, we want to make the game better, so there is still hope of making the game we dreamed of at the start.
After we finished the first level and the corresponding quest, Luca and I were both at about 50 hours. That’s how long it took to make every base feature: movement, especially jumping; the tilemap; parallax background; gravity; camera movement; inventory; collectable items; ways of checking if the inventory had an item; removing said items; a character who gave you the quest; animations; and special attributes of certain tiles, like climbable vines, just to name a few. Then came the next — arguably more difficult — part: Scaling it out. We had the base features, but we barely had more than seven minutes of gameplay. And we needed 30.
As we scaled it out, we realized something we probably should have guessed earlier. Each level needed new features to make the game more exciting. We already knew we’d need different quests, but just what those new quests would entail? We hadn’t really given it thought. In the end, we took it one level at a time, adding whatever idea seemed to be reasonable but also fit our game.
After a lot of work, we had finally created enough content for 30 minutes of play. In the first level of our game, a raccoon has you gather materials to make a backpack, which expands your inventory. The second level has you light three lanterns in return for a key to the caves. In the third, a golem asks you to collect ten crystals by exploring the caves, bouncing on mushrooms, and avoiding bats. The last level has you water some plants for a fairy before you finally finish the game. When I think about the features we added, they seem so simple. Bouncy mushrooms, bats that send you back to the start if you hit them, and plants with growth cycles, among others. But I have to remind myself that each of them required tons of work. The bats, for example, took more than five hours to code, and I think the mushrooms took Luca around ten. It was not a walk in the park. But I have to commend us: none of us had ever made a game before. I’ve coded a few things, but Luca only knew basic code. Neither Layla nor Peter had done digital pixel art before. As much as this was a project about making a game, I think I have to agree with Hack Club on this one. Building is about learning, and since learning was our goal, however scrappy our game is, we succeeded.
But hang on, I missed something very important: The trip to Shanghai that followed the game development. It would have been nice to complete our 100 hours and then book our flight and figure out logistics, but no. The challenge ended April 1st, and we had to be in Shanghai by April 4th. So, in the second month of developing our game, not only were Luca and I (we were the only people on our team able to go) doing two hours of coding a day on top of our homework, we were also scheduling logistics, filling out travel papers, applying for visas, and booking flights. (Kudos to our parents who put in a ton of work to make this happen.) It was a lot.
But then, at the end of it all, Luca and I were somehow on a plane. On the way to Shanghai. By ourselves.
It was kind of terrifying to fly across the world without our parents. But once we had safely been delivered to Tongyu (a Hack Club staff member) at the other end of the flight, excitement set in. I remember sitting at dinner the first night thinking, Oh my gosh, I’m really here. And so are 90 other kids from around the world. This is crazy. Yes, that’s right. There were 90 other kids there. Hack Club had initially planned for 30. I was only expecting 30. To be sitting in that room with 90 other kids, who had all put in as much work — or more — as I had was, well, crazy.
The first few days were spent in a hotel in the middle-ish of Shanghai. That first full day, after breakfast, we went to the venue for the opening ceremony. There, we got our merch, and they explained what the plan was for the week. We split off into groups based on what we wanted to do with our week. Thomas’ group would make websites, Paolo’s would document the trip, Tongyu’s would make music and sound effects, Kai Ling’s would do crafts, and Acon’s would make PCBs. Luca and I ended up in Acon’s group.
We spent most of the first day hanging out in the venue, which was called Bottle Dream. It was open to the public, so people came in to try our games. On one of the first days of the trip, a girl and her mom came into the cafe for a few hours. It was so cool to see her play Dust and Dawn even though our lives were totally different and we didn’t speak the same language. She spoke English much better than I spoke Mandarin, but it was still pretty hard to communicate what the best way to play the game was. Despite our language barrier, we were able to guide her through the game, and she was able to give us feedback. At some point later in the day, Paolo asked her what game was her favorite, and she said Dust and Dawn was. I was so surprised and delighted when, later that afternoon, Paolo told me what she had said. Like, we are so different, but at the same time, we aren’t. We live across the world, but we both have a passion for games, and we were able to connect on that.
On the second day, our group was supposed to go to an electronics market to buy parts for our PCBs, but it was closed, so we went to a nearby shopping area instead. We had a really fun time looking around one of the buildings (it had more than five floors!) for a few hours. That night, a walk to the park was organized. One of the neat things about Shanghai is that it is really safe, even at night. Most streets are well lit, and there are police officers who direct traffic in busy intersections to make sure no one gets hurt. The streets are also pretty much trash free. This made it quite nice to walk around and explore.
One of the things I noticed right away was how happy people were to use translators (like google translate except not google because it’s banned). The flight attendants who escorted me and Luca to Tongyu at the airport used a translator, we used translators with the people at the front desk in the hotel, and to ask for metro tickets from a service desk in the metro. No one grumbled at having to use a translator or gave us a funny look when we walked up and showed them a translation of what we wanted on our phone. It was a totally acceptable way of communication. In some cases, we didn’t even need to use a translator because many people knew some English. We often found ourselves having a conversation with a little English, a little Mandarin, and a translator to fill in the gaps in our skills.
Speaking of language, I was surprised at how many people from Hack Club spoke English. There were kids from 23 different countries, many of which English was not the primary language. Yet, I don’t think I met anyone who wasn’t able to communicate effectively in English. Most kids actually spoke more than two languages. One kid I met spoke four! Mandarin, German, English, and French. I really wish I were fluent in more languages than just English. It is definitely a useful language, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t put emphasis on learning another language. The fact that we only start learning a second language in high school is kind of silly compared to countries that start in middle or even elementary school.
In the middle of the week, we moved from our initial hotel to a hotel further away from the center of the city. It wasn’t necessarily the outskirts because it was a huge city, but it was definitely more spread out and felt less cramped. Our venue there was called AI Hacker House by Sparklabs, and it was in a park in the middle of an office park. On the first morning there, Luca and I took the metro into a different part of the city to look around a mall. We went there for a stationery store, which we did find, but we also found a really cute Studio Ghibli store! We had previously only ridden the metro with a big group, but it was actually pretty easy because all the signs had English translations. One of the coolest things about the metro was how there were walls and doors on the edges of the platform that only opened when a train came, so you couldn’t fall into the tracks. The trains also somehow stopped so their doors perfectly aligned with the doors on the platform!
On the last full day, Thomas told all of us to meet at Sparklabs at 11 for the final part of the event. After a lunch of sushi, he introduced us to four real-life game developers who would look at all our games throughout the afternoon before deciding which were best. During that time, we also got to go around and try other people’s games. After the developers finished judging, Thomas and the other organizers gave everyone 100 white rabbit candies which we could use to vote on which games we liked the best. Some of my favorite games were:
- Not an Idle by Armand (nanomars.itch.io/clicker-game);
- Do You Like Trains by Isidore (firn.itch.io/train-game);
- Ossatura by Adrian and Siwen (jadenlong1234.itch.io/ossatura-demo);
- 2–4D Game by Leon and Maximilian (hamster69591.itch.io/2–4d-game);
You can take a look at all the games (and the stories behind them) at juice.hackclub.com/games.
After voting, we counted up the number of white rabbits we had gotten (Dust and Dawn got 115!) and played in the park outside. Someone had made a giant juice box out of cardboard and cut armholes in it, so we had a lot of fun running around wearing the juice box. We might have been too loud because a park patrol had to come tell us to quiet down. We took a group photo, and Zach, the founder of Hack Club, gave a thank you speech to all the people there, and especially to the organizers. Afterwards, we ate dinner, and once people had finished submitting their votes, Thomas called us together for the awards ceremony.
The first awards that were handed out were the Judges’ choice awards, given to the three games they thought were best. There were also people’s choice awards given to the three games that got the most white rabbits. All of the developers for those games got certificates and Blahaj (giant stuffed sharks from IKEA). To end it all off, a few Hack Clubbers thanked Thomas… by dumping a box of fruit rinds on his head! Everyone had a good laugh about that!
Overall, Juice has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. It was a huge project that I never thought I would complete when I started, but doing so has proven to myself that I am capable of doing really cool and difficult things. On top of that, getting to go to Shanghai has allowed me to meet so many amazing people from around the world who all share a passion for coding and game development. Maybe someday I will be able to see some of them again. I am so thankful for Thomas, who had a dream and wanted to make it happen, and for all the other organizers, Paolo, Kai Ling, Tongyu, Acon, and Rhys, for helping make that dream a reality for all of us Hack Clubbers. I have lived that dream along with everyone else and will never forget it.
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SJND Pilot Island Editorial Staff 2024–2025:
Editor-in-Chief: Anne Obuchi ‘25:
News Editors: Jaslyn Ho ‘26
Features Editors: Naomi Seche ’26 and Anabel Arista ‘27
Opinion Editors: Nicolaus Thyen ’27
Reviews Editor: Austin Ly ’27 and Sean Kimbrew ‘27
Sports Editors: Jeremiah Myers ‘27
