Senior Harvey Gao sat at his computer, staring intently at the screen as his fingers flew over the keyboard. He watched as line after line of code materialized before him, slowly building the game that he had been making for the past two days with the help of his friend Senior Joshua Wong. Their aim: to make and submit a game for the Ludum Dare game making competition. Before that could happen, they had to do some planning and preparation.

“First, we decided to learn the framework,” Wong said. “It is not an engine in the case that Unity and Unreal are. It is more of a framework you use so you don’t have to write all of the code yourself. Then we decided to make a top down shooter.”

Wong and Gao were on a huge time crunch while making the game. While 72 hours might seem like a lot of time, they had to go from the bare framework to a workable product in just three days. To organize themselves, Wong and Gao made a sort of calendar for themselves using a Google Doc.

“We just set a bunch of deadlines for ourselves,” Gao said. “Then we tried our best to meet them. To communicate, we texted or used Facebook messages.”

After hours and hours of coding, a wedding appointment that occupied Wong for four of the 72 hours, and various other hurdles, the game was finally done. To submit their game for judging, Wong and Gao had to release it on GitHub, a software sharing website. However, they soon ran into some problems while uploading the game and entered a very familiar situation for many students at school.

“The game submission deadline was at 8pm on Monday, so we finished the game at 7:30pm,” Wong said. “On GitHub, there is a page where all of the releases are, but since we didn’t have our first release out, the URL wasn’t up yet. Uploading the release to GitHub was taking a long time. I saw it was 7:59, with 30 seconds left. So, I just guessed what the URL was and turned it in. That way, by the time our game finished uploading, the URL would be up, but the game wasn’t uploaded at that time.”

With that ordeal done with, Gao and Wong aren’t done with making games. They entered another, longer Ludum Dare that had a deadline of September 30th. They also had time to reflect on why they loved making games.

“For me, it is interesting to be able to learn something and immediately be able to produce something using what you learned,” Gao said. “If you learn how to make a game, you can immediately go and make your own game, and see the product right there. It isn’t something intangible, and playing the product is really satisfying.”

For Wong, making games was part of a lifelong love for programming and playing video games. Ever since he was a little kid, Wong had been programming whatever he had around him, as well as playing video games when he could.

“I played Starcraft 1 in elementary school,” Wong said. “Then I started learning programming, when I was 12. The first programs I wrote were on my TI-84 calculator. I only really got into programming when I got into high school. Since I was both liked programming and liked playing games, I said well, might as well make some games.”

As far as the motivation to make their first Ludum Dare game, there was no question about it. What they wanted to do was honor someone who was very near and dear to their hearts.

“We did it for Harambe,” Wong said. “ If you got one thing from this, it is that we did it for Harambe.”