If your goal is to win a hackathon (or a game jam, or anything similar), your project is there only to support your presentation. It's how you sell your idea wh

If your goal is to win a hackathon (or a game jam, or anything similar), your project is there only to support your presentation. It's how you sell your idea what gets you the price, not the project itself - it doesn't even have to work all that well as long as you present it right. Of course details depend on the judging rules of the particular contest - you "market" your project differently when there's a panel of jurors and differently if it's the contesters that vote on each other's projects. In contests with panels of jurors you can often predict which project each jury member will likely vote on based solely on their professional background. I've been to countless game jams and my first win (after a long while) was with a simple one-gimmick game that barely managed to not crash during the presentation. If you're there to have fun with technical stuff, you have small (but non-zero) chance of winning, because perfecting your presentation is rarely what people who go to hackathons for fun consider fun ;) TBH, the best jams often have no voting and no prizes at all :)