#brakeley

Hey Internet, I'm Dan Brakeley, and I've been working at Proletariat as a coder since February. I recently got the chance to return to my old high school to take part in a STEM Career Fair. I grew up in rural Maine, where there weren’t a lot of role models for kids who were into computer programming and video games. I would have loved to have met someone who actually worked in the industry when I was a kid (let alone someone who had also graduated from my high school), so I decided it was important to help out, if I could. 

First, I had to figure out what I was actually going to do. STEM stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math" and game programming requires elements of all of those. You want to make a game to fly through space, or jump over a spiked pit, or throw a ball? For all of those, you’ll probably need an understanding of trigonometry, Newtonian physics, and linear algebra. So now I had something relevant to talk about.

They also offered me a projector, so I decided I would plug in my laptop and show off Unity (the game engine we use here at Proletariat). I thought it would be good to show off the free tools that people in the industry actually use. And the students could then download it at home and check it out if they wanted.

The final flourish was to glue a few things to some foam core (high-school style), and I was as ready as I’d ever be. 

  Once the kids started coming in, and I started to talk to them, it turned out many were already aware of tools like Unity, and they were much more interested in seeing a full fledged game in progress. I ended up pulling out my iPad and work laptop and showing them World Zombination, including what the source code looks like and how we used Git to track our work. In retrospect, that's what I would have wanted to see, too. Even if you have programming or computer science classes at that age, you probably aren't going to get much exposure to building large pieces of software or the engineering and tools that are employed to allow that to happen. There is a huge difference between printing "Hello World" or even balancing a binary tree and making a game with puzzles, narrative, music, animations, AI, online play, and everything else you might want to add.

I knew ahead of time that whatever I prepared, I wouldn’t really know what to do until I started talking to the kids, and that just being there was going to be enough regardless—and it turns out I was right. I’m really glad they invited me, and I hope I get the chance to do it again in the future.

I’ll close with some highlights of the day:

A student walks up, sees "class of 1998" on my sign, and says, "Hey, that's the year I was born!" Little bastards.

I got an unexpected amount of love for having worked on the Sly games (at two different times, someone wanted their picture with me, holding the copies of Sly I had brought).

The projector they made available maxed out at 1024x768. I am so spoiled these days. Life in the big city has made me soft.

I underestimated how old a high schooler really is. They are people. I was expecting kids. Does that make me old?

Probably.