Rotten Underground

Project Links
Github	Ayan Bindal (3xay)
Itch	Devansh Malhotra

Rotten Underground was a game I made for the Hack Club Campfire Hackathon.

Everything that is not important

It's a small top-down shooter where you stop the infestation of a subway. It was made in C with the Raylib library.

Organizing

I was not originally planning to make a game for this jam. I was actually a part of the organizing team!

I was inspired to organize a Hack Club hackathon from when I attended the Counterspell hackathon the year before. A lot of people attended, and I had a lot of fun; I wanted to remake that experience for others.

The organization process started around November- plenty of time before the event in February. We worked on getting funding, looked for venues, and did outreach. All of this was a great learning experience for me. It helped me to understand how to sound professional and talk to big scary adults!

Running the Event

The day had finally come, and I was very excited. The rest of the team and I arrived at the venue around an hour before the attendees were supposed to be there.

We set everything up, then the first two arrived. One of them was my friend, Ayan Bindal, who I met at Counterspell. With him he brought his friend, Devansh Malhotra.

We were hoping for at least 10 more to come, so we waited.

And waited.

And waited...

The Pivot

So, it was just Ayan and Devansh. We decided that we didn't want to do a six-person competition (that would be including the organizers), but we didn't want to just go home either.

That's when we had a crazy idea: Our venue was in Fort Lee, just across the Hudson from New York City. So, we used the leftover funding to buy an Uber to drive everybody to the NYC event.

Participating

Since we didn't need to join the organizing team in NYC, I joined up with Ayan and Devansh to make a game together.

The theme for this jam was "Beneath the Surface." We decided on making a game set in an infested subway system. It is a top-down shooter where you have to shoot your way through hordes of rats, and eventually defeat the scientist who was the cause of everything that was happening.

We made the game in C with the Raylib library. I really love Raylib, but I have some regrets made with making this design choice.

I now think that C, Raylib, and anything low level should only be used on a project which you can spend more than two days on, so you have more time to make the codebase neater. For any future game jams I do, I will use scripting languages and higher level game engines to make my life easier.

Nevertheless, I still had a lot of fun making Rotten Underground; Raylib is an amazing library!

The NYC event was a 2x12 hour event, meaning it was two days long of twelve hours each. Since Ayan and Devansh live in central Jersey, they stayed over at my house (in North Jersey). We watched that nights episode of SNL, played Civ VI, and worked on the game. Fun times!

Like last year (in Counterspell), we did not place well in the event. Unlike last year, we had barely any time to work on it for the week-long post-jam competition, so we didn't place in that either.

Overall, this whole event was tons of fun, despite it being a rollercoaster of emotions! If you want to play the game, you can do so on Itch.