Play 'Guardians of the Grid'

Hello there, energy enthusiasts! Our summer 2025 hackathon has just been and gone, so we wanted to share one of the cool things that came out of it: the first game (in what will hopefully be many) from the self-proclaimed Arenko Game Studio.

TL;DR

We built a grid frequency game based on Pacman which is perfect for some inter- and intra-company competition, educational awareness and just generally a bit of a laugh!

Follow this link to give it a play: https://guardians-of-the-grid.arenkoarcade.com/

We need you 🫵

Before we give a bit of the backstory, we wanted to hear from you:

👀 Are you interested in joining us for a hack day? We are seriously considering running an open hack day and we’re keen to see if there is broader interest - if so, get in touch with us through your contacts at Arenko or via hello@arenko.group.

🔜 What would you like to see next? We’ve got a fun roadmap for this game and we are also open to suggestions for future games. Send us your thoughts and we’ll see what we can do!

The hackathon experience… and the start of the Arenko Game Studio

Right, now a bit about the day in general and how Guardians of the Grid came to be…

At Arenko we run three company-wide hackathons a year, some themed and some unthemed. This was an unthemed hack day so the flexibility was there to come up with some awesome ideas… Luckily this is where my esteemed colleagues Dan Taylor (Director of Engineering) and Peter Hull (Tech Lead) stepped in: “Why don’t we create a game?”

Little did they know what they had stumbled on… with a rough, unpolished gem of an idea found a few of us came together to refine it and turn it into the diamond it could be. On the team we had Peter (Tech Lead), Patricia (Software Engineer), Ben (Software Engineer), Andre (Head of Commercial) and myself (Principal Product Manager). Small but perfectly well formed.

The day started at 8:30am and with less than 9 hours until the presentation (or, more importantly, the arrival of the Dishoom takeway for the post-hack social) we had to get started.

Needless to say, the opportunities were boundless but, given our passion for Arenko’s mission “to save the planet by creating a zero-carbon grid worldwide”, it quickly became clear that this should be the core theme. This set the direction for our ideas, and something based around grid frequency was an obvious choice.

To give us the best chance of getting full marks in the “Progress” scoring criteria (the other two criteria being “Wow factor” and “Innovation”), we needed a template game to use for our vibe coding prompt, so we chose Pacman.

Then came the influx of ideas… How do we brand it? What’s the world called? How difficult do we make the gameplay? What animations can we add in? What about two players?

True to the Arenko development philosophy of ship fast and often, we managed to get a game live by 9am, but, with quite frankly too much excitement and not enough alignment, Ben (aka our newly identified Game Producer) stepped in with some sound logic… let’s just get an end-to-end version of the game working and go from there. Pretty obvious really.

With the MVP defined, branding set, and characters chosen, Peter and Patricia really dialed up the focus to get the game working with expert oversight from Producer Ben. The focus was so dialed in, that I even heard Peter muttering acceptance criteria to himself whilst tapping away… I was half expecting to come back after lunch to a Jira project full of user stories.

Now, you might be asking what Andre and I were up to whilst this was all going on. We were doing what we could to support the team, which included creating the wireframes of the user flows; using AI to generate our characters, worlds, etc.; and writing the copy for the game.

After an intense morning of riffing and some decent progress under the belt, it was time for the customary hack-day pizza followed by a team coffee run to keep the energy levels up.

Fed and watered, we got back to it. Peter, Patricia and Ben focused on the game, while Andre and I started to build out our presentation. Ultimately, to get the votes you need to win the coveted Lorax trophy, you also need to have a strong pitch to champion the idea.

It’s always pretty frantic in the last hour or two of the day… The inevitable last-minute tweaks like adding an animation or two, choosing a theme tune for the game, and doing an end-to-end run-through of the pitch.

We were feeling pretty confident as time was called, but that confidence went up and down as other teams presented their projects - particularly “Big Screen Energy” - I mean, they even had a drill involved in their hack.

However, as soon as our presentation started, with dramatic music and a high-energy intro by Ben, we knew that hope was not lost. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding on these hack days though, and so, after Andre’s run-through of the grand vision which raised expectations even further, all pressure was on to give a faultless demo… Peter and Patricia nailed it and gave a full run-through of the gameplay without any issues. For me this was a pivotal moment in the presentation and one I’ve been burned by in previous hackathons where we had to fudge the demo because we were just shy on the progress front. A proud moment for the whole team and a culmination of the whole day’s work.

All in all, the journey into game development was an incredibly fun experience for us all and we hope it brings you, your offices and perhaps even your children a bit of joy too.

Ohh and yes… before you ask… we did win 😏!

What should the Arenko Game Studio do in future hackathons?

Should we build another game or look to improve Guardians of the Grid? Let us know!

Some of the ideas we had for Guardians of the Grid expansion packs:

• Global, long-term leaderboards
• Multiplayer head-to-heads
• Levels (level 2: adding in grid constraints; level 3: lower scores for high-carbon energy sources)
• Character selection

New game ideas:

• A more mobile-friendly game - think something like Flappy Birds, but for grid frequency?
• A game about getting your assets through the connection queue
• Sims, but for building energy assets