Have you ever participated in a hackathon? I hadn’t until a month ago.

Boot.dev’s first hackathon was announced July 22nd, and had three days to plan until the start of the hackathon on the 25th. I was thinking about what to make for it for 2 of those days.

Suddenly, my friend, Kyren, asked me if I wanted to join him and another member of Boot.dev, GottZ, on a team.

We brainstormed a bit, and settled on a tower defense about stopping bugs from getting to your CPU.

We decided to write it in Zig, since we enjoy the language and it would allow us to manually manage our memory without some of the footguns of C.

The graphics library we used was Raylib; it’s super simple to use, and available for many, many languages.

Kyren did the art, and most of the tower defense parts.
I worked on some mouse logic, the build script, and did testing on MacOS.
GottZ worked various parts, mainly the game over screen and readme.

We had 3 days after the start of the hackathon to write our project, and we worked day and night on the project.

The project was at an MVP 17 hours before the deadline; at this point, we hadn’t actually come up with a name for it, so we decided on CPU vs AI. And so, we were finally able to submit our project.

At this point, it was pretty late where I was; so I went to bed, happy that we had finally finished it.

So, morning comes and I wake up. I don’t remember how long it was before I looked at Discord, but I do remember my surprise when I found out that we had won!

For our victory, we were rewarded a personal letter of recommendation from Boot.dev’s founder, Lane, and a special commemorative coin. The coin was made of metal, and surpisingly heavy.

And that’s how we won Boot.dev’s first hackathon!

Our project is on GitHub, go play it!
https://github.com/The-Memory-Managers/cpu-vs-ai

Kyren also made a blog post about this, go check it out!
https://kyren.codes/blogs/making-a-game-in-3-days