Fair Play Labs

Between November 27th and 29th, the 2009 FairPlay Challenge took place. Sixteen of our nineteen members were able to assist an participate in the event which took place at www.elmanantiallodge.com. The location, service and food were superb and met all of our expectations.

The event started on Friday the 27th at 2:00pm, when the bus arrived to take the group to San Gerardo de Dota, an almost 2hr ride from our offices. Upon arrival the group was divided into two teams and given time to discuss ideas and come up with the final decision on the project they would develop over the next day and a half. The challenge itself was to develop a game from scratch to working prototype in the 28.5 hrs, including art assets and audio.

As morning came, the adrenaline could be felt and the two teams were ready to go. By 8am the Shadow Bunny team (Oscar, Diego R, William, Felipe A, David, Leonardo and Melina) were at the table working on scope, project deadlines and division of tasks, while The Deadline team (Carlos M, Christian, Felipe C, Andres, Roberto, Carlos G, Diego J, and Claudio) did their part to ensure sucess. Cesar worked on audio with both teams.

As the day creeped upon them, and the hours started to be lost to the time gone by, the teams had to rework the loads, scope, and working order. A few regroupings and a lot of decisions were made at this point which became crucial at the end of the event.

Night caught up with the teams and team members started to balance sleeping times among them. A few were able to pull an all nighter, most of them took 3 to 5 hour naps between midnight and early morning.

The Shadow Bunny team requested an extension of 1.5hrs which The Deadline team accepted and the final working time for the project was moved to Sunday by 2pm.

As morning broke, both teams started to find flaws and bugs in their games and in an amazing effort, team members were awoken and all pushed together to clean the final builds.

By 12 noon, the jury members (Claudio's son, Daniel and 2 of his friends), as well as spouses and partners, started to arrive to be part of a thrilling ending to our 2009 FairPlay Challenge.

At 2pm all work was stopped, lunch was served and after a short break the 5 jurors (the 3 children and 2 girlfriends) were ready to perform their duty. Each team presented their project and iPods with both games were given to the jurors to play. After much deliberation and in a very tight decision (3-2) The Deadline team won!

Our congratulations to all FairPlayers for such a wonderful event! Both games were absolutely fun to play, with amazing art and audio assets and showed one more time that FairPlay Labs is what it has, it's people.

Here they are: