MITxPRO Students
Welcome to Sparrow Arcade! We started the team with just three core members who all graduated from the first cohort of MIT xPRO’s game design course: Kayla, Keegan and Britton. The three of us identified a gap between graduating a game design program, and actually being able to get a job in game development.
To be considered for most roles in game development, potential employers look for a portfolio of work by the applicant that gives them an idea of the applicant’s capability, and proves that they can finish a game. Since it’s difficult to get a job without a portfolio, and it’s difficult to make a portfolio without a job, graduates of game design programs are left in an awkward situation.
To address this, we created Sparrow Arcade as a community of developers who want to learn and improve their skills, all free of charge. We provide a platform for aspiring devs to learn by participating in “game jams”. These game jams are game design competitions that provide a theme and sometimes restrictions on development, then give all of the entrants a set amount of time to produce a game that meets those specifications. Those games are then rated by the community, and winners are chosen based on who got the best ratings.
We build teams for game jams with the goal of learning and practising the core skills needed in game development while also producing games that can be used in a portfolio. We guide aspiring game developers through the early stages of building a portfolio that can feel very unstructured and overwhelming by providing access to.
