One of my favourite college memories is building a C++ visual debugger with two close friends during a 72-hour national hackathon. We called it Game To Debug. The idea came straight from our own frustration — we were doing a lot of competitive programming back then, and traditional debuggers felt clunky, especially when trying to understand recursion or complex data structures.
So, we built something we wished we had: a tool that visualized your code as it executed — line by line, loop by loop, stack frame by stack frame. Arrays, maps, recursion trees, DP tables — everything came alive in real-time.
It was scrappy, chaotic, and ridiculously fun. We ended up placing 15th across India, and more importantly, built something that genuinely helped us (and others) understand how their code actually worked under the hood.
Looking back, it was a big early win that got me excited about building developer tools — the kind that make complex things feel intuitive.
The code’s pretty rough (we were sleep-deprived college kids, after all), but if you’re curious, you can still check out the GitHub repo.