Kevin Dreams of Ruby

I attended the Boston Festival of Indie Games (or more exactly, the Game Jam part of it) held at MIT last Saturday. It was my very first hackathon and despite feeling the often-hard-to-avoid symptoms of Imposter Syndrome. Why did I suffer from Imposter Syndrome you might ask? Well, I honestly thought this Game Jam was going to be a room filled with super-smart, highly-proficient and experienced programmers. As a beginner, would I be able to join a team? Did I even belong here? This is, afterall, MIT (and indeed there were MIT students participating).

So imagine me, having only a couple months of coding experience and absolutely no experience in game development, walking into a room filled with people who I assumed to be, in this context, better than me.

Well, it turns out that I soon found out that I was wrongly judging the situation, as well as myself. A rather adventurous-looking fellow had walked into the room and sat next to me. After a few minutes he was commenting on how he liked my T-shirt, and that broke the ice. Turns out John did not have much programming experience at all. He’s more of a producer, he says, and mentions that he had a partner who had the technical know-how to develop games. Eddie, his good friend, came in soon later. We chatted, we teamed up and started brainstorming ideas. Another chill dude, Dan, a few seats away asked to join us. His speciality is audio and music. I thought, we’re going to have a game with custom music and sound effects? SWEET!

Fast forward an hour later, after all the obligatory introductions by the event volunteers, the going-over of the rules, etc. etc., and we’re in a classroom with John, the producer and team manager, Eddie the adept programmer, Dan the audio specialist, and another cool cat, Illustrator/Photoshop graphics expert Anthony, had joined our cause to create the best side-scrolling, 16-bit-style, beat-em-up game ever. Despite my extremely limited knowledge and experience in JavaScript (check out the Impactjs game development framework we used), I was able to basically pair with Eddie and help out here and there. At the very least I was the “navigator,” looking out for syntax and logic errors, offering suggestions on how the code should be implemented, and integrating our audio and visual features into the source code.

Long story short, it was truly a blast to work with these highly-talented and creative people. They made seven hours seem like two as we were hustling and bustling to the very end to get our game up and running. In the end we presented our game in front in a lecture hall in front of hundreds. John gave an energetic introduction and Eddie demo-ed our game to the delight of the audience. We had everyone amused and laughing at our purposely-over-the-top and ridiculous game made with custom-made music and graphics. I felt good and I felt happy. I felt like I had contributed and added value to my team, to a product we created together and was being presented to a packed room at MIT, nontheless. And Imposter Syndrome? Wasn’t feeling it. It was long, long gone. I was confident in my own abilities.

So if you haven’t already, go join a hackathon. And if you have been to one, go to more. There’s really no reason not to, especially as a beginning developer. Don’t know anything about a language, library, or framework that will be used? So what? Just be confident in and apply what you already know, and learn along the way. You’ll be surprised at how much you pick up because you’re in a hectice, time-constrained environment where you are forced to. Furthermore, contributions from non-developers, as I’ve shown, are MUCH-needed, whether it’s audio, art, UI/UX, or whatever.

It’s a terrific way to get yourself out in the community, meeting people, making friends, and learning about and working with things you’ve never tried before. There’s really nothing you can lose, only a whole lot to gain. Just be careful, though; you just might, like me, get addicted to them!