Building a 2D Arcade Game in 24 Hours with Gemini AI at Google Prompt Wars (1st Runner Up)

The 24-Hour Sprint at Google Prompt Wars

Hackathons are an incredible crucible for testing your speed, architectural intuition, and teamwork. When we entered the Google Prompt Wars hackathon, the challenge was clear: leverage modern LLMs and generative prompt techniques to build a captivating, functional product in under 24 hours.

Rather than building another generic chatbot or summarizer, we decided to take a bold route: reviving the nostalgic arcade classic Snow Bros as a multiplayer 2D web game, where enemy behaviors, dynamic difficulty levels, and stage generation were guided by Google Gemini.

Architectural Breakdown

// Example of our collision and snowball transformation state machine
interface EnemyState {
  x: number;
  y: number;
  snowLevel: number; // 0 to 3
  isRolling: boolean;
}
function applySnowballHit(enemy: EnemyState, power: number): void {
  enemy.snowLevel = Math.min(3, enemy.snowLevel + power);
  if (enemy.snowLevel === 3) {
    enemy.isRolling = true;
  }
}

What Made the Judges Say 'Yes'

Winning 1st Runner Up validated our philosophy: build real, delightful products that run flawlessly in front of the jury.