Routing was my first hackathon project ever! It was at HackNotts 2019, of course, and at the time I didn’t really have a clue what a hackathon was or what to make for one.

I was in my first year of Computer Science at the time, and we’d just had a few lectures on packet routing around the internet, so I figured I’d make a game based somehow on that. The idea is that the player builds up routing tables over time, connecting the devices together as they join the network and instructing the packets what their “next hop” should be.

It’s actually kinda fun. I ended up making it in Lua actually, using the love2d library, and as such my main hurdle was… Lua itself. Annoyingly, if I’d used Haskell (as I was originally planning), I’d have won the Haskell Prize, since nobody else entered the category. Either way, good fun. Do have a look at the slightly longer writeup on my Devpost.