CyberBug 2077

CyberBug 2077 is a neon bugrunner where you avoid enemy debuggers and corrupt an infinite codeworld. The best way to learn code is by breaking, gaming, and surviving the system itself as an anomaly.

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Inspiration

We've all been in a bad CS Class. You stare at your code for two hours. It doesn't work. You have no idea why. All the guides and lectures are literally in a different language (assembly). You just want someone to tell you what went wrong and why it matters.

That's the thing about bugs, nobody teaches you to think like one. You just get error messages and vibes.

So we asked ourselves: what if learning to debug felt less like homework and more peak? Meet CyberBug 2077, what pac-man and the VSCode debugger would be if they decided to merge.

What it does

CyberBug 2077 drops you inside a running program as the bug itself, hunted by debuggers, causing chaos, and accidentally learning CS along the way.

You wreak havoc by:

  • Incrementing/Destroying loops — congratulations, you just made an infinite loop
  • Corrupting/Changing variable values — downstream logic? Destroyed.
  • Cutting if-else branches — the program is now legally blind
  • And Random Function Calls — yes you can teleport around the map and yes it gets annoying especially when you teleport yourself into a debugger

The twist is that the damage you cause is the curriculum. A first-year student who's never heard of any specific error will understand exactly why it's bad after spending five minutes trying to weaponize one. No slides required.

Perfect for beginners who learn better by doing something chaotic than by reading lecture yap or doing LeetCode. Which is most of us.

How we built it

Pure HTML No frameworks, no libraries, no npm install that takes 45 minutes. We wanted anyone to be able to open a link and just play, whether they're a CS major or someone who just found out what a variable is last week.

Just clone the repo, to your VSCode or any other IDE, install the Live Server Extension and run the HTML file locally. Bang.

We worked collaboratively using Git, used HTML for web dev, and used Figma to design the logo on the thumbnail (some inspiration taken)

The world is procedurally generated so every run gives you a fresh codebase to destroy. We also wrote a custom physics engine from scratch because we were having too much fun and made some questionable time management decisions.

Challenges we ran into

  • Custom physics from zero. No engine, no tutorial that matched exactly what we needed. We just tested random speeds until it worked
  • Making random levels actually fair. Because generating a random chunk is easy. Making sure the player doesn't immediately spawn into an unwinnable layout is a whole other problem. We broke the generator way too many times

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It's actually fun. Like, genuinely. We kept playing it to "test" it and that's our story and we're sticking to it.
  • A beginner programmer can pick it up with zero context and walk away understanding why certain bugs are more dangerous than others, all without sitting through a single lecture.
  • We shipped a custom physics engine AND procedural generation at a hackathon.

What we learned

  • Beginner-friendly doesn't mean dumbed down. The players who got the most out of CyberBug 2077 were the ones who'd never written a for-loop. They picked up the concepts fastest because the game made them feel it instead of explaining it.
  • Fun is really hard to build on purpose. Serious. It took more iteration than writing software for any website or app I've built before.

What's next for CyberBug 2077?

  • Let players paste in their own code and play through their actual bugs as levels. In essence, personalized suffering.
  • More bug types with different abilities and movement styles (bugs are invisible so invisibility is in the game, so maybe a flame effect for firewall bugs idk)
  • Leaderboards so the most chaotic players get the recognition they deserve
  • Smarter debugger AI that adapts to how you play and actually hunts you down properly. We want him them to feel like the Terminator.

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