I can't code. I can barely draw, let alone do graphics. And I've got about as much idea about how the back end of a game works as I do rocket science. So what on earth was I doing at a two-day game hackathon in Cologne?

At first glance you'd think I'd be completely unsuited to attend Europe's first Newsgames hackathon. Organised by the game studio The Good Evil and the Cologne Game Lab, the event brought together developers, coders, graphic designers and journalists (like me) from all over Europe. The aim? To develop, in just 48 hours, a prototype newsgame that helps to explain topics in the news. Quite a hefty task for someone who grew up playing video games, but never thought about actually making them.

Newsgames have become increasingly popular in recent years. Tomas Rawlings, whose digital media and video games consultancy Auroch Digital runs the news-gaming project Game The News, explained that journalists are now not only competing with other news organisations, they're also competing with games.

"You're competing with Candy Crush," Rawlings said. "You're competing with Clash of Clans. You're competing with every other app that the user can close and open up. So if news organisations are not making use of the interactivity of these devices, then the output they produce will become increasingly stale next to the evermore elaborate investigations." This is why you'll see a lot of what Rawlings calls "gamic" elements on news sites these days. From quizzes to quick, mobile-friendly games, these games draw in a significant audience.

According to Marcus Bösch, co-founder of The Good Evil and one of the hackathon's organisers, games are a big digital medium yet to be tapped by most big news organisations. "I think people are recognising a lot has changed and we already missed the beginning of Facebook and Twitter. What comes next?

"Journalists are very keen to see what comes next. I'm pretty sure games come next and if you ask me, they are the leading medium of the 21st century. They're used broadly in business, in medicine and science, so why not use them in journalism?"

European news organisations certainly seem to be taking newsgames seriously. The event was sponsored in part by Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle and The Suddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's biggest newspaper, sent a team of three to the hackathon.

Of course, before you start making a game, you need a decent idea. Everyone at the hackathon was invited to pitch a game in just 60 seconds, trying to lure others to their team to bring the idea to life. One suggested a game about the return of wolves to Germany's forests, another wanted to create a Monopoly-style game about tax evasion. Each team would round off their pitches with what skills they needed to create the game.

But don’t be fooled by the “news” in newsgames – when it came to the project pitches, not one team said they needed a journalist.

It’s not that journalists have nothing to offer in this new genre, it was more these teams needed the people who could do the actual creating, namely coders and graphic designers. As a result, I found myself clustered with three other journalists, one academic and a game developer – but no graphic designer and no one who could code.

Cue panic.

We had a vague idea of what we wanted to do, a game about privilege and how lack of it makes life more difficult for certain members of society. After a frenzied five minutes, and some much-needed help from Rawlings, we settled on creating yet another version of Flappy Bird, an already infuriatingly difficult game.

The idea was to make different profiles which would be randomly selected and would be more difficult depending on what "profile" you had. So, for example, the "elderly" profile would move incredibly slowly, making it more difficult to finish the level. The LGBT profile had more obstacles. But if you were lucky enough to land on the "white, heterosexual, male" profile, your bird flaps through the level with relative ease.

Admittedly, it's a crude metaphor, but it seemed like we could make it work with our limited skills. Fortunately, by this time, we managed to entice a coder onto our team, who set about recreating a Flash version of Flappy Bird using ActionScript.

Unsurprisingly if you can't code, you won't spend much time in the back end of the game at all. For the first day of the hackathon, me and two of the other journalists spent our time looking up facts about everything from LGBT rights to disability, which would flash up every time the player completed a level or died.

If you're going to create a game about the news, then you're inevitably going to need someone to research the facts behind it. Another team created Find Me, a game based on the ongoing story of the missing schoolgirls in Nigeria. In it, you play an FBI agent tasked with finding the girls. By engaging media interest, the player buys more time to find the girls.

Team member David Farrell, games design researcher and lecturer at Glasgow University, explained it was a satirical take on the Western media's initial response to cover the story. He said: "It's a satire of the media's response to, particularly the kidnapping of the girls in Nigeria, but in general the media response to any kidnapping.

"In the game, it's a trade off of actually doing the work of finding the girls and engaging with the media game."

And this was where the journalists, the people who had never made a game before, came in. For 'Find Me', they were the ones fact-checking what was going on the real world, which was then mirrored in the game.

One of my favourite games came from a group of French developers. Called "Shame Gas", the gamer takes on the role of a lobbyist for a shale gas company. Inspired by Plants vs Zombies, the player takes on the role of a lobbyist for a major shale gas company, tackling protestors and attracting sponsors.

In the end, our Flappy Bird clone, renamed Flap Your Privilege, was definitely the more slapdash of the bunch, but not a bad effort considering the majority of our team had never even touched game making before. With no graphic designer on our side, we turned to the web, which is full of free-to-use pixel artwork. In the end, given the time constraints and the fact we definitely aren't planning on making any profit from our game, it was easiest to use the game art from Flappy Bird, courtesy of a tutorial on how to create the game.

So, can you create a game from scratch without any coding or design experience? Theoretically, yes – so long as you’ve got a coder and designer on your side. At the end of the 48-hours, we had a playable game, albeit not nearly as good-looking as some of the others on display.I think it's important to manage your expectations with a project like this. While it's easier than ever before to make your own game, without the necessary skills, you're not going to end up with the next Angry Birds.

But when in doubt, just rip off Flappy Bird.

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