campfire eindhoven: organising a hackathon with zero experience

it is december 10th, 2025. just a few days ago, i’ve watched a video about campfire, the next hack club sattelite event. i dreamed about how cool it would be to attend one in the netherlands. this is the first time that on the map they show on their websites, a pin pops up in the netherlands. i join their slack channel, to be greeted with this message:

hmm, i thought. what if i not only participate in a hackathon but also help organise it? i was pretty hesitant at first though, because i have never done anything like it.

i got added to the organisator group chat though (we were three people in total), and seeing they were struggling to get everything along i slowly started taking on more tasks. for example, i got us a sponsor: papa johns! i was so proud of myself for that. i also suggested some food options and ordered a few prizes from amazon!

the day of the event came closer. first, my parents didn’t want to let me go, but from school i got an assignment to do mandatory community service (maatschappelijke stage). this eventually convinced my parents! i first intended to stay one day which already got me the hours needed, but i liked it so much i eventually convinced my parents to go again on sunday (it was a two-day event) after going to church!

the day-of

i arrived at the venue at around 8:45 and most stuff was set up already by our Eindhoven city guy, nelis. i talked to some people to get them comfortable and after that we started the opening ceremony 30 minutes late, after having some problems with HDMI.

the snackbar being set up!

after that, i did a quick workshop showing everyone the basics of gamemaker studio 2, the software we used. luckily everyone understood it quickly and could start working on their game!

around midday, lolo (the snackbar guy) made us sandwiches. we also got a presentation by someone from a real game development studio (Totem Game development)!

at 5pm everyone demo’d their progress so far! some people already had their basic game loop completed, which i was totally flabberghasted about. everything was so polished and people had great ideas!

we ordered pizzas from papa johns which took an hour to get there, but they tasted great.

the day-of (part 2)

day two was great too! i arrived in the afternoon, but in the morning we secured an AMA with eric jordan from 2advanced studios! eric said he loved chatting with the hackathon participants so that was amazing.

everyone just continued working on their games, but for dinner we got pasta bolognese and during dinner everyone demo’d their finished games.

the winner was a very cool variant of minesweeper! congrats to emil, praveen and nils! we had blahajs and useless boxes as prizes.

all in all, it was very fun and i learned a ton! for a more linkedin-esque analysis of what i learned from it, go check this post!

mart out