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Joining the Astra Hackathon

Building Our Block with Astra, from isometric Singapore worlds to multiplayer party games, with a few engineering lessons along the way.

Teh Kim Wee
·3 min read
Singapore-inspired pixel characters on the Our Block character selection screen.
Pick your kaki: local legends, from Merly to the kopi robot.
The 1950s world with Cathay cinema, the Wall of Death, a badminton hall, and a sea-bathing enclosure.
Singapore at play: exploring the 1950s world.
Teh Tarik gameplay with a moving cup catching a stream of tea.
Teh Tarik! Catch the pour and build up the foam.
Flag Eraser Showdown with Singapore and Japan flag erasers on a classroom desk.
Flag Eraser Showdown: three erasers each, across a familiar school desk.

I returned to the Astra Hackathon with Don Ng to build something “out of this world”. Having already built a 2.5D isometric world, we wanted to turn it into a working multiplayer game (which eventually did work after the hackathon).

Our Block explores Singapore’s different eras through local history and multiplayer party games (think Stumble Guys + World Exploration to earn power ups).

Building at the hackathon

We each had our own Codex session running, using the GitHub plugin to commit, raise PRs and deal with merge conflicts. After much discussion, we came up with a few games inspired by different facets of Singapore life: eraser flipping, teh tarik pulling, getai singing, and “queue maxxing”!

With the designs in mind, we searched the web for reference images and styles we knew we wanted to adopt. This gave Astra a clearer idea of what we were going for and was a lot more effective than prompting with descriptions alone. The minigames took surprisingly little time to build with Astra Medium on Fast Mode!

For the world design, we wanted to try Blender and Astra after seeing some of the cool products built in previous weeks. It turned out pretty well, though constructing the entire world needed quite a bit more steering to get the right ambience and atmosphere for each era.

What we shipped

Our Block (the final product) spans five eras: 1950, 1975, 1987, 2005, and 2026, with worlds built using Blender and Astra in Codex. It brings friends together through five games, using your phones’ gyroscopes and accelerometers, along with buttons, as controls:

  • Flag Erasers: a core memory from our school days!
  • Teh Tarik!: a cool blend of ideas that we thought worked well with the “colliding” concept.
  • Singapore Skyways: a “jump quest” from a really popular game that the slightly older crowd might remember :)
  • Last Order, Lah!: respect for our queue culture.
  • Getai Groove: rhythm + singing the old classics!

Engineering with Astra: a few tips

Astra still needed some engineering direction:

  • Room polling: The original build used D1 polling for room state, which wasn’t great for responsive multiplayer. Remind it to use Durable Objects for room polling through the Cloudflare MCP!
  • Sites deployment: For sites with large sizes / long build time the deployment may fail repeatedly. You can try to upload large files to R2 (call @Sites to do it) before building the entire site.
  • Design with subtraction: Astra still produces self-referential text and additional artefacts from time to time, so it’s worth asking it to polish things after a feature is built.
  • Overtesting: It can sometimes spend too much time checking and testing a feature, so testing it yourself may be quicker!

Nevertheless, Astra was awesome to work with, especially with unlimited credits, and felt like a massive step up from 5.6 Sol in design and spatial capabilities. If you’re still on 5.6, you’ll be blown away by its design and 3D skills!

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