Codenomaly

Codenomaly home screen
How to Play Screen
Create game screen. Select a language & a map
Join Lobby
Lobby / Waiting area for multiplayer games
Gameplay screen | Players & files on the left | Chat on the right
Glitch indicates closeness to failure
Game over when the bugs are not all found on time
Survived

Team Name: Codenomaly

Members: Stephen Mertyl, Kira Archer, Marilyn Anderson, Naima Sana

Inspiration

During this semester, the team constantly found ourselves debugging projects for class. As Computer Science students, we're always surrounded by code, and sometimes, it feels like the bugs are hunting us. That was when, during this hackathon, we decided to devise a both fun and innovative solution to practicing debugging.

We created Codenomaly, a horror-themed survival game inspired by "I'm On Observation Duty", where players must work together to debug constantly propagating errors before they are overwhelmed.

What It Does

Codenomaly is a browser-based multiplayer game where players must survive 5 minutes inside a shared coding project.

Players:

Join a lobby using a 4-letter code
Choose a programming language (C#, C, Python)
Load into a VSCode-style environment
Search for errors that spawn over time
Select a line and classify the error type
Manage their Stability meter

Errors accumulate dynamically. If too many exist at once, the game ends in a loss.

If a player’s stability drops to 0%: $$ \text{Stability}_{new} = 50\% $$ Their screen glitches temporarily and they cannot interact, but they rejoin the game shortly after.

The goal is simple:
Survive until the 5-minute timer ends.

How We Built It

Backend

We built the real-time multiplayer server using PartyKit, a WebSocket-based room server.

The server:

Maintains authoritative game state
Spawns errors over time
Tracks player stability
Broadcasts synchronized updates

Key logic includes:

Dynamic error spawning
Stability decay when viewing corrupted files
Global error counter monitoring
Win/loss evaluation

We made the server authoritative to prevent desynchronization issues between clients.

Frontend

Our frontend stack includes:

React 18
Vite
Tailwind CSS
Monaco Editor
Zustand

We used Monaco Editor to replicate a real IDE experience. Players click lines, select error types from a dropdown, and submit fixes.

We separated:

Client-local UI state (Zustand)
Server-synced game state (PartyKit broadcasts)

One key architectural decision was isolating latency-heavy processes from the main UI thread. Stability effects, popups, and glitch overlays are managed separately so the editor never freezes.