Hello from the Kajam Mentors

Ten Replit users were chosen to be mentors for Kajam, which is Replit's annual game jam. Each mentor's purpose was to be on call throughout the competition to help others out with brainstorming, code problems, and offer feedback.

IroncladDev, Dainfloop/haroon, and bddy collaborated to create a surprise game for the closing ceremony of the jam. Try it out for yourself here.

Oh, also, we can't forget CodingCactus and Coder100 for helping out on some ideas for the game!

Don't forget to follow us on Replit.

Mentor Experience

As a whole, the mentors agreed that mentoring experience awesome. Although there were less questions than expected, ultimately the mentors had a great time!

"The mentoring experience was amazing. Even though I wasn't asked as many questions as I expected, it felt like a big accomplishment every time I helped someone fix a problem with code, offer feedback on a game, and brainstorm" - IroncladDev

"The experience was amazing, and I don't think I've been involved in the community this much before. We weren't asked for help that often, when we did help it was explained quite well for the user to understand. Overall, it was awesome to be involved." - DaInfLoop

"Mentoring Kajam has been great. I've had the chance to help a lot of people on both the Replit and Kaboom servers. I think mentors is a very useful tool especially with your first games :)" - Danie (lajbel)

"I loved mentoring the Kajam. as, my knowlage with games is small, I tried to help a few, and I loved it! I hope next time, theres more participants to help!" - bddy

The Surprise Game

Some of us were being pretty jumpy. We then decided to make a game that would be presented in the Kajam closing ceremony since we had a lot of time on our hands.

Instead of one week, we had two until the closing ceremony, so we kind of relaxed and built our game.

The first day was mainly brainstorming and coming up with some awesome, mediocre, and hillarious ideas. CodingCactus came up with the idea of a dragon that would breathe fire when it had chilli peppers, bddy came up with a bird game where you had to pepper-spray birds out of the sky, and a few more were created by other mentors. The idea of the dragon was taken up, and the bird one was kicked out of the sky.

"I drew the graphics and built most of the game mechanics. I'll tell you one thing, pixel art animation is hard!! Overall the other pieces of the game went pretty smoothly. It was amazing collaborating with my fellow mentors!" - IroncladDev

"It was my first time using p5.js, and learning a new library is hard, especially when p5 isn't really meant for game design even! However with the tutorials that Ironclad gave before Kajam started, it helped quite a bit. Seeing as it was some people's first time with Kaboom and many other different libraries that were used, I do sympathise for them." - DaInfLoop

"It was also my first time using p5.js, it was hard. I kept practicing it, and tried to help with the game. As I didn't help much, I gave some ideas." - bddy

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Be sure to join us for Kajam next year! Thanks for reading, and happy coding!