Three McGill students won silver in the second Great Canadian Appathon earlier this month. Resistor5, a team of U4 engineering students, developed the second-best mobile video game in a 48-hour long competition that included over 400 students from across Canada. 

Mike Hoffman, Mike Darwish, and Stephane Beniak’s game, titled Ludicrous Archery, beat over 100 teams in the competition. As the name suggests, Ludicrous Archery is an archery game similar to the popular Angry Birds. The game also has a series of power-ups and obstacles that make it more difficult. 

“You have some targets on each level, and you have a bow,” Hoffman said. “You have to pull back the arrow and try to hit the target. You aim a bit like in Angry Birds.”

Hoffman said that their team name is an inside joke from their engineering classes. 

“[Our academic] program is all of 25 people,” Hoffman said, “We all know each other well. No one [else] understands what [Resistor5] means.”

Appathon’s sponsors, XMG Studio Inc. and the National Post, decided to change the rules of the competition this year. When the competition opened, they announced this year’s installation would have a theme: sports. The new rule was intended to make it harder for contestants who approached the competition prepared with ideas for games beforehand. 

For Darwish, working under a theme was one of the major improvements of this year’s competition. Announcing a theme at the start of the competition made it nearly impossible to prepare in advance, he said.  

“It feels cool to build something in such a short amount of time,” Darwish said.  

The competitions are organized by different universities in each city. In Montreal, the competition is based out of Concordia and l’École Polytechnique de Montreal. Because McGill is not directly involved in the organization of the competition, it’s not advertised on campus. Resistor5 only knew of it because Hoffman and Darwish competed in the first Appathon earlier this year on a team that included a student from Concordia.  

Meanwhile, national competitions like the Appathon are “the big buzz right now [for] start-ups and think-tanks,” Josh Redel, U4 engineering and president of the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS), said. “But all these big competitions are for mobile apps because that is the big thing.”

A similar, yet significantly smaller, competition is held annually at McGill. The department of electrical, computer, and software engineering (ECSE) organizes the McGill CodeJam in late November. The competition grants prizes of $1000, $500, and $250. 

Beniak noted that competitions are very beneficial to students because they provide an out-of-class dimension to students’ education,  providing another way to learn. 

“These competitions are great, because in 48 hours you learn a lot,” he said. “More than in many semesters.”