TL;DR: Riot Games hosts a yearly Hackathon for devs in the community. This year’s teams focused on data visualization and making players better.
At Riot Games we firmly believe in making data available and empowering developers to build tools in order to improve the player experience. We’re constantly looking for ways to help foster new developers and improve the skills of existing members of our developer community, and one way we do that is with our annual Hackathon. For the past 4 years, we’ve invited developers from all around the world to come to Riot HQ in Los Angeles to take part in a three-day Hackathon, and this past hackathon we had 50 developers from 17 countries fly in to create projects focused on two categories:
Visualize: Present data in a new way, or show us a better way to consume game data
Teach: Make players better! Provide a tool that will help players improve their skills.
These projects were to be judged by a panel, made up of Amine Issa (CEO of Mobalytics), Sharon Coone (Editor in Chief of Blitz Esports), and Chris Shaw (Riot API Product Owner).
As always, we were stunned by the quality of the projects that came out of the hackathon, however four teams stood out.
Honorable Mentions
Visualize: OmegaLoL
Omega LoL is a Twitch Extension that helps capture your stream's most epic moments. Harnessing the power of Twitch chat, the extension automatically records clips when key emotes are used in high enough frequency. Highlight clips are shown in the custom match history panel, allowing viewers to find highlights for each League of Legends game the streamer has played since they started streaming.
Teach: Cosmic Insights
This project provides real-time in game information to help you play. Built on a screen overlay system, it displays in game guides for builds, skill order, combos and play style. Everything is reactive based on how you are playing. For example, if you are ahead or behind of your laner, your recommended build paths and play style will change.
Winners
Visualize: Champion Changelog
Champion Changelog is a League of Legends website that helps returning players get back into the game. Players can type in their summoner and champion name to get relevant champion, ability, item and rune changes since the last time they played that champion. It also acts as a good summarizer for patch notes for someone who doesn't read patch notes consistently.
Teach: AutoGuru
AutoGuru empowers third-party creators to build awesome apps with the Riot API. It uses Natural Language Processing to quickly answer common questions about the API and help developers get back to building tools. AutoGuru provides instantaneous answers, which allows developers with great ideas to quickly execute on their idea without getting held back by difficult, but common, problems. AutoGuru helps prevent new users from getting quickly frustrated.
