This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.
I submitted four projects to the bolt.new hackathon. It was truly a wild experience. To I have won hackathons in the past and typically you have a single weekend to make something interesting and make it work. The entries tend to feel half baked, somewhat unusual as you sometimes have to pivot to fix the coding style or limitation. Also work in a third party code or script for hackathon requirements and be able to showcase and demo your app at the end.
Now, keep in mind since I've done this and won others in the past I felt very confident going in I would be very competitive and have great ideas. Never would I expect to complete 4 ready to demo app in the course of a month.
I made a game called: Edit History. The game is a interesting one, I was thinking about how education is so different today. I have a 10 year old daughter and she loves gaming. I was thinking of what would it be like to have her learn something new, and game at the same time. The game Edit History is exactly that you will change the course of history by changing a story. Ai will then show you a timeline of what happened after you made a change to the story. Your story will then be ranked based of three factors. The game play is unique, the stories can be detailed and fun. The game also lets you learn what actually happened even if you do not know what happened in history so you can learn more about the events over time.
This game had features like stripe, email, and user accounts. I also used gemini to help make the timeline of the game. It was hard to get the design right as I kept getting results that I felt didn't make sense. I wanted the game to be mobile first so I can eventually make it a real app in an app store.
I made a game called mysterybox.cards
This game has custom art made by ai and concept was all my own also. I wanted to make a card type game where you collect cards, and then you can play mini games. Everyday you get cards, and then can unlock mini games by staying active. The cards are fun, and you can play with them in the games. The games get harder as you collect cards. The purpose of the games is to have fun, maybe in the future you can play against friends but for now its a solo game. There are 5 mini games which have various logic. This is a mobile first design so it can be made into an app also. I think this turned out much better than I anticipated. You can also by tokens and a membership from the store which helps unlock boxes quicker. I had plans to make 7 games I only got through 5. I was going to make 1,000 cards but when I thought about it 180 made more sense for the first deck. More decks might come later. Also the rarity of cards algo was complicated to come up with there are more common cards than rare. I had to help develop the database to support the games and different types of cards.
I made a hackathon Reddit challenge type simulation game: fantasysubgame.com
FantasySub is a play on reddit its self. If you have no experience with reddit, you are supposed to join a /r sub group and then you basically try to drum up interest with your content in order to gain points and flair so you can show off your profile. In the fanstasy sub game we pretty much do the same thing just much faster. We show you how an interesting story can build interest and comments. After a story goes viral you will gain a lot of followers. The idea is to take over the leaderboards. Part of the challenge was to make a real group on reddit and have the devvit api post something there. I decided to have the post from my game land there so you can see what all the users are posting in the game. This was a fun experiment, but mostly curious what others think.
Just as the last weekend rolled around before submissions were due on bolt devpost. I got an email here is 20 million tokens for free only for two days. I was like I already finished 3 submissions oh no here comes another crazy idea. I got a bit tired of making games and wanted to take another challenge of make a whole start up business in well a day.
So I went to work coming up with how my new company would operate I tried to describe everything in detail. I even had some figma designs done with ai to help show what I'm building. After a lot of tokens and some luck 90% of what I wanted to show was done. I built a marketing website, a backend for a product, an api design, a embeddable product. I full featured database to support the effort, and was nearly done. I had burned through about 10 million tokens. Claude 4 probably wasn't even sweating. I had the site on netlifty and saw the potential. I then connected the strip API made the products for reoccurring charges, and felt I was near the finish line. I still think 1 month of real testing if what is needed to truly finish this startup.
When most of my project was nearly done, I made a new startup called leadflow.chat. Its a chatbot to sales pipeline tool for small to large size businesses. I have the marketing site to show the capabilities. The product shows you how it works when you sign up for a free trial. The product is nearly ready for primetime. It's ready for investors to see the huge potential of the product. There isn't anything like it in the marketplace, there are similar things, but I think leadflow.chat makes a lot of sense with clarity of a sales cycle and showing its value with an existing or new sales team.
What is next it to build the api and cdn sites to be truly scalable for the future, but to build startup in less than 24 hours was really awesome.
Actually I was so busy for the last 30 days I suddenly don't know what to do anymore. As Bolt sent an email with do not work on your projects or you will be disqualified. Anyway, I hope the judging goes well and is quick so I can work on these projects again.
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