Horizons Arcana - from the perspective of a watermelon 🍉🇸🇬⭐️

Some notes before you read this:

• It's the personal perspective of the author and some information may be inaccurate. Feel free to tell me if I made a mistake and I'll correct it if I feel that I was wrong.
• If some piece of text needs clarification, feel free to contact me.
• The goal is not to criticize or glorify the event but to let others know my perspective of the event.
• I will not use any names while criticizing to respect that person's privacy.

Horizons Arcana was one heck of an event. I had so much fun in Singapore and I will cherish these memories forever. My favorite part was talking to the people and taking some banger pics in SG. As a photography enthusiast, it was a dream come true when I got to explore an awesome place like Singapore freely and take as many photos as I could. HUGE HUGE SUPER HUGE THANK YOU TO ALL THE ORGANIZERS AND HC STAFF FOR MAKING THIS EVENT SO GOOD IDUHFIUDFHISDFHISDFUH 💖 I still can't believe that the event is over. i wish it was longer 🥺

A little journal

31st Jul

Reached the venue at ~12 in an airport pickup group led by Anson. He gave us Doremon themed MRT cards, yay! Then I headed to watch The Odyssey at Lido IMAX with @Lemong. The movie was a banger and I was in tears when Odysseus strung his bow 🥹🥹. After that, we headed back to the venue to attend the opening ceremony. I was so overwhelmed and excited. There was some spare time as the ceremony got delayed so I talked to other attendees. I teamed up with @Lemong and @Neon. We decided to make a furry cafe simulator game. Didn't make much progress tho. During the night, I explored the nearby area with @Lemong and he took me to this really cool custom keyboard shop, and took some more pictures near the venue.

After that, we had so much fun dancing to songs and later went to sleep at ~3 AM. Since I didn't bring a sleeping bag, I had to sleep on the floor :). AND WTF THE AC WAS SO FREAKIN COLD 😭

I also recorded these cool videos that night :)

1st Aug

After ~4.5 hours of sleep, I woke up (SOMEBODY TURNED ON ALL THE LIGHTS 😡) and headed straight to explore the city. Anay, Anirudh, Aryan, Rudransh, Alisha, Devansh and a few other people were with me and we went to Marina Bay and Merlion Park. I kinda got tired walking but we did have fun. We had peak Indian food 🔥 :P

After coming back at ~1:45, I took a lil 20 min nap and got back to work after a short while. We created a prototype of the app. I was working on the art and I designed the sprite for Nick. Then it was time for lightning talks. i prepped a lightning talk about how the furry suit was the best item in horizons shop.

there were tons of other cool lightning talks asw. personally, lemong's talk about ubisoft was my fav. We also showcased the protype of the app and got a cool arcana keychain. I went out to do some shopping and exploration with Anay. 1st Aug was @hex's birthday and I talked to the orgs about this and they bought a cake so we celebrated that night. After the celebration, we just sat and talked and later went to sleep.

2nd Au

Okay, the last day of the hackathon. After waking up, I started working on the project ASAP and drew a background and some more assets. Then I rewrote the whole codebase with Claude and added the bg music that @lemong created. I then went out on a short boba date with Daamin :P

After that, there was the closing ceremony and our game didn't make it to the top 5 :( After that I took some more pics and then we headed to J8 (post event acc). After reaching my room, I took a shower and then we headed out to explore the city. We had some food and then visited Mustafa Centre. I also took some fire pics on the way and we had so much fun! We sat next to this 7-Eleven store till ~2:30 AM. I video called my friends and cousins and then headed back to the hotel. We had some instant noodles there and we talked till ~4 AM and then finally went to sleep (5 people in a room meant for 2 😭). Woke up after ~2 hours and checked out :)

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Venue

The venue was super cool and happening. We had enough space and had a fun time there. However, we didn't have access to the venue for ~6 hours on the second day of the hackathon (i.e. 1st Aug). That was kind of a bummer as we were forced to leave and explore the city. I did explore the city and had SO MUCH FUN. But since we had to vacate in the early morning, I (and about 60% of others) who slept late at night lost the flexibility to have more sleep or work on projects. (P.S. the orgs did communicate this limitation to us and insisted we sleep — but hey, it's a hackathon after all 🫠.)

Food

I appreciate the fact that there were enough vegetarian and vegan food options. The amount of food and snacks was ample. There might be some edge cases that I am not aware of, but judging based on how nice and helpful everyone from the organizing team was, I am pretty sure they handled it well. I have no complaints with the food arrangements whatsoever.

The sleeping situation

So before the event, we were told (in the #senators Slack channel) that they didn't have enough mattresses for everyone, so we'd have to arrange sleeping bags ourselves. I didn't pay much attention to this and didn't bring a mattress. Things started to get more complicated when a lot of people didn't bring a sleeping bag and ended up sleeping on tables, floors, or chairs.

I was told that there would be mattresses for everyone the next night, but that also didn't happen. I still wanna ask: what caused a lack of mattresses? if it was a budget situation, why not add it to the shop?

The people!

First of all, everybody from staff and the organizing team was super nice and helpful. Though I personally didn't spend much time with them, as they had lots of work to do, they helped me multiple times, and at any point during the event and conversations over Slack, I didn't feel like I couldn't say/ask something to them. I interacted with almost everyone from the team. I know a person who said that a particular organizer was "mean" to them, but they gave me no proof whatsoever, and based on my experience with the organizers, I don't think that is true. If somebody experienced this, you must report it via Shroud.

As for the participants, I had a nice experience with most of the people. There were some not-so-nice and/or annoying people (based on interactions over Slack as well as the IRL event). I have found people use slur words and disrespect others while taking advantage of the language barrier. For example, there was a case where a person said horrible stuff about an organizer right in front of them, and the organizer didn't understand it because they didn't speak Hindi. I feel deeply saddened that this happened 😔. The org was trying to help that person, and that person was just being super rude to them. Apart from that, there was an insane (imo) amount of slur words used "casually." I've attended other flagship events before and this is the first time I felt this. There were a few other cases as well, but it's not appropriate to discuss them here, and they've already been communicated to the orgs.

I made about 4 new friends and they were really nice and fun people. YAYYYY!!!!!

Travel and accommodation logistics 🚄

The organizers worked really really hard to apply for the visas of the participants and made the whole process very convenient. The process was near perfect. Though it wasn't needed, it would've been nicer if the visas were applied for earlier; because afaik, parents of a lot of participants (especially the ones who were traveling to an HC event for the first time) were really worried.

Huge shoutout to Daamin, Karthik, and Manan for working so hard to get our visas.

I (and about 8 other people) was picked up from the airport by Anson and I was given an MRT card. This was seamless and I didn't face any issues. I also stayed in post-accommodation and that was also quite seamless, and Aly helped us with checking in and other needs.

Project reviews :)

okay so i revieweed a ton of projects for horions arcana so i have a lot of insight on this. i'll try not to be biased and here's what i have to say. If everybody spent 5 mins reading the horizons shipping guide and properly tested their projects, over 90% of the rejections and delayed would've been avoided. There were some exceptions and mistakes that happened on our side but they were negligible and were addressed in a timely manner.

I know there was a delay in the review process and I acknoledge that improvement can be done to make the process faster.

As for fraud review, I know it was pretty slow as well and there's room for improvement there as well. I just want everyone to know that all of us tried our best and as far as I know - nobody was unable to attend the event because of review delays and we provided debt as well. If you are someone who failed to attend the event because of review delays, please reach out to me - I'd love to hear your story and make sure this never happens in the future.

And that's a wrap!

Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope you enjoyed it and got some insight into my experience at Horizons Arcana. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences, feel free to reach out to me. I am Arjav (@february friday on slack).