GAMEATHON 5.0

GAMEATHON 5.0, organized by the Department of Information Science and Engineering and student club BitsnBytes, is one of the most interesting and popular events across the country. It is a 24-hour Game Development Competition, in which competitors must come up with intuitive and innovative ways to bring their unique game concept to life. Every past GAMEATHON has been a huge success so far, with remarkable team participation rates that having doubled with each passing year since 2018. We have reached another milestone last year, when we held GAMEATHON 4.0 as a national event with 40teams from all around the country participating and constructing absolutely incredible games. This year we stepped up our game by opening up the event to global participants. Teams from various institutes competed to win prizes from the pool of USD 2000. We had judges from universities from around the globe and experts from tech giants like Etsy and Apple to provide us their critical opinion. This time our Main Judge was from Arizona State University in the USA. This was the first year we had taken our event to a international audience and it was a grand success! We had over 200 teams (with 500 participants joining us on our vibrant campus on D-Day) from over 20 colleges in Bangalore, over 10 colleges throughout India and over 3 Institutes across the world partaking in this event.

We released the 3 themes for the competition at 9 PM on the 24^th which was 12 hrs prior to the commencement of the countdown. The themes were

1. Life is currency
2. Choose a path
3. You control the game not the player

On the 25^th we began the day by the Inauguration Event, where we were joined by our esteemed judges and all the dignitaries on stage. Our Heads of departments, our teaching staff as well as our non-teaching teachers joined us in the audience. Our entire auditorium was filled to the brim with the excited participants!

We had Mr. Ashish Mathur, Vice president –professional services at Anthology and Dr.Yezhou Yang, the group lead and founding principle investigator at Arizona state university as our Chief Guests. We had Dr.Piyush Kumar Pareek a Professor in CSE department & Head of IPR Cell at Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology as our Guest of Honour. As Jury Members we had Mr.Thrivikrama Taula, an expert AI / ML leader, start-up advisor and investor, Mr. Chetan M, a principle technical trainer and as an academician and a mentor for Smart India Hackathon, Mr.Vijay Kulkarni who is the Vice President of Technology & Development at Labour Solutions, Singapore, Mr.Karunakara T R senior program Specialist for one of the health insurance customer of NTT DATA and Dr. Bharatesh Chakravarthi, the  Fulton Entrepreneurial PostDoc Research Associate at Active Perception Group, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. Our valedictory judge for the event, Mr.Gurucharan is a senior software engineering lead at Apple Inc.

The Countdown began at 11:30 AM and the participants began to work on their respective games in their allotted classes. We had allotted 2 coordinators per class to look over the contestants. We also had coordinators who looked over the proceedings of the participants joining us virtually. Our core team was in charge of the management of the entire event.

Lunch was served at 2 PM and Snacks at 6 PM and Dinner at 9 PM. We also had a few cultural programs after dinner so that the participants wouldn’t feel burnt out. Judges joining us conducted 3 reviews throughout the day for all the teams to assess their progress.

On the 26^th at 12:30 PM, we had our valedictory function where we gave the cash prizes to the teams selected by the judges. We had various categories for the prizes. The ‘Judges Pick’ was given to four teams and they were ‘SIMPS’, ‘Team Elites’, ‘Grindset’ and ‘Quadnet’. The winner in the category of ‘Best Sound’ was ‘RQQRXY’, ‘Best Design’ went to ‘ESPADA’, ‘Best Theme Interpretation’ went to ‘Tribit’. The Runner Ups were ‘Spy Squares’ and the Winners of GAMEATHON 5.0 were ‘LAST OF US’.