By developing their video game “Sunken Cost” overnight, five Santa Clara students emerged with a first-place award, defeating twelve other teams at the first-ever 24-hour Roblox Hackathon. Santa Clara’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) partnered with Roblox from April 13-14 to put on the event centered around the theme “Time is Running Out.”

Junior Alexandre Lopes, sophomore Ethan Sychangco, senior Danny Lin, senior James Vong and junior Josh Kindarara aimed to design a game that was unique from both other task-based action games and their competitors.

Inspired by games like “Overcooked 2” and “Five Nights at Freddie’s,” “Sunken Cost” has the player race against the clock to prevent their ship from sinking.

“We really wanted to hone in on the notion of an implicit timer,” Sychangco said. “Instead of having a big countdown on your screen going three, two, one you lose, you get to see that countdown with how flooded your ship is.”

The team faced a steep learning curve since neither Lin, Lopes nor Kindarara had experience working in Roblox Studio, a game-making program using the Lua programming language. The Imaginarium, a high-tech computer lab located on the second floor of Heafey, provided resources for the team to practice work in extended reality, data visualization and game design, skills that they honed through long nights to ensure their project was as enjoyable as possible.

“Playing the other games, we definitely had a leg up,” said Sychangco. “We put a lot of effort in creating our own game assets that let our game have a different level of atmospheric touch.”

While Lin and Vong are set to graduate this year, the remaining team members are eager to continue their journey and participate in future hackathons. Given ACM’s collaboration with Roblox and the success of their other on-campus hackathons like Hack for Humanity 2023, students are looking forward to the future of in-person competitive coding at Santa Clara.

“We barely saw any other team,” Kindarara said. “Having hackathons in person, being able to interact with other teams and meet the company putting on the event or your mentors would be a lot of fun.”

All of the games submitted to the hackathon can be played on Devpost here.