I Ran A Game Jam In Toronto
About two weeks ago, on March 1st, I ran a 12 hour game jam for high school students in Toronto with a couple of friends from hack club. Around 30 students showed up and made their own games :D
Act 1: Planning
It all started last year around the start of December when Hack Club announced that they’re going to be running another satellite game jam. I was stoked and I already knew that this is something I wanted to help organize but didn’t want to be the lead organizer/PoC as I knew I’d be busy and couldn’t take on that much responsibility. So as soon as PoCs were announced and they started looking for a team I applied, and well, I got accepted as an org.
We had a pretty small organizers team with only about 5 people at the start, and the first few weeks were honestly pretty dull with nothing much going on and the entire team more or less was pretty much inactive during December. We started getting more active and picking up the pace by mid January, and I reached out to a few big companies which I knew were likely to sponsor us with something like PCBWay, who agreed to donate 150 PCB rulers and sponsor custom badges for our event.
PCBWAY Rulers
Badges Sponsored By PCBWAY
I also reached out to Jukebox Print to see if they could sponsor us, and I followed up multiple times with no response, but as I was about to give up, I got a reply from them and they agreed to sponsor stickers for our event!
Jukebox Stickers :D
Apart from these two, I reached out to a bunch more companies, but didn’t really get much of a response except for EasyEDA, who gave us some coupons for a PCB workshop! And aside from these, the Campfire Toronto team managed to get Mullvad VPN and Three Farmers as a sponsor too. Mullvad sent us like 150 of their 1 month VPN vouchers along with a bunch of stickers which was really cool. And Three Farmers sent a giant box full of snacks to my house.
Everything was honestly looking pretty good apart from the fact that it was now February and we still didn’t have a confirmed venue. We were in talks with Shopify and we were pretty confident that they would give it to us (they did not), we had George Brown as another option but they needed us to pay for the venue and we didn’t have any money at that point.
I think around the same time, we got a message from Campfire Oakville team asking if they could merge with us because they didn’t have a venue. We were like “sure, why not”, and so we merged, it came with some pros and cons, pros being that they had a ton of Yubikeys that were donated to them and that Geotab agreed to sponsor them (we still haven’t gotten the money lmfao), the cons of this merging was that now we had a super large organizers’ team. It was already a challenge to manage a team of 5 people at times, and adding more people definitely didn’t help.
The problem with large teams is that it often reduces overall productivity if not managed properly, and in our case it was definitely not managed properly. For most of the time, I felt that we didn’t have roles assigned or distributed properly, which led to a few people pulling a lot of weight, and the rest not having much to do. The root cause of this was that we didn’t have a clearly defined leadership role or someone consistently coordinating responsibilities, which I only fully realized later on. As the event got closer, I tried to step in where I could to help assign tasks and keep things moving.
Fast forward to the week before the event, we get a reply back from Shopify after a ton of follow ups, and they said that they couldn’t host us this time because they had other events running, but they did offer to donate $500 to us. This was basically game over for us, we were one week away from the event and we lost the only venue option we had, panic set in and we were scrambling to get a venue, at that point, we didn’t even care if it was free, we were willing to pay to get it. So during the entire weekend before the event, I spent most of my time in a slack huddle with @alex and we scoured everything to get a venue, we landed on using Peerspace and DMed a bunch of venues if we could rent them out next week, and we got a few replies back the next day.
So on Tuesday I went downtown along with Andrew to check out the venues and the first stop was a restaurant/bar called Teddy Beer and the guy agreed to give us the venue for 20 hours for $900. The next venue we visited was a Mexican restaurant which was a whole lot more expensive and they didn’t allow external catering so that was a no go for us.
Unfortunately the team wasn’t on board with us hosting the event at a place which had a bar so we couldn’t go with teddy beer. We eventually decided to go all in on a venue that Alex found which was called Pink Light Stage, it was $800 for 12 hours (expensive!) but still better than nothing. We decided to book that venue for March 1st.
It was Thursday and our event was in literally 2 days and we still didn’t have any of the sponsor money come in, we had asked the owner of Pink Light Stage to hold it for us till we arranged money, but now time was running out. We were promised $500 from Shopify and $500 from Geotab, but we didn’t receive any donations from them yet, as these companies usually take their sweet time when it comes to responding (we still love Shopify). We needed to have the venue booked by tonight and it was looking rough, me and Alex were discussion on how we could split the cost and front the money ourselves, and we tried to get people in our organizing team to help front us some money. The estimated amount was $80 from 10 people which was pretty tough, but at this point I was ready to front more money just to run this event, and so was Alex.
But then a miracle happened, Shopify’s donation came through. And I think this happened while we were on a lock in huddle for venues discussing how to front the costs ourselves. I cannot tell you how relieved I felt when the donation came through, I had the best dopamine rush in my life. Suddenly, running Campfire Toronto didn’t seem that impossible anymore, and we had to front even less money now. I went ahead and donated some money to front the venue cost, and so did a few other of our other organizers.
It was all looking good and we ended up booking Pink Light Stage for March 1st by the end of the day I believe. We did run into another problem before booking it where we got hit by a massive charge while trying to checkout another venue, but that’s a whole another story which I’ll cover some day else.
On Saturday, a day before our event, I went to checkout the venue along with Alex. To be completely honest, based on the listing we all though that this venue had multiple rooms but as it turns out it just has one room and the images in the listings were just the same room with different settings. But oh well, we already paid for it so it doesn’t matter anymore. We started arranging stuff, moving some chairs and couches, setting up a carpet, and bringing out tables. After we were done setting up the stuff, we home and I think we had another lock in huddle!?
Act 2: The Event
I woke up at around 5:30, took a quick shower, got dressed, picked up two bags full of snacks and merch and then left to catch a bus. I took the bus with a friend all the way to downtown, and then we walked probably for like 30 minutes because the TTC streetcars are slow as shit and practically useless.
I made it to the venue a bit late at around 8:00 and then went ahead and set up our merch table.
Half of my time at the event was spent in the organizers’ hallway as my social energy was pretty low. The other half of my time was spent looking at peoples games and handing out Mullvad vouchers and Yubikeys to them. I think in the end, almost everyone left with a Yubikey and Mullvad voucher :D
Soon came judging time, people set up their games for other people to play and I had a ton of fun just looking at projects made by people in like less than 8 hours.
Almost everyone who participated won something here. Our first place winner was a solo hacker, and he won three plushies and three IEMs which was funny.
And just like that, after all the hard work and countless hours spent stressing, everything came together and our event ran smoothly.
Post event, we spent a bit of time cleaning up the venue and kicking people out. And by 8:30 we wrapped everything up and almost everyone left.
Act 3: Aftermath
You best believe I had the best sleep I ever after successfully running Campfire Toronto. It was honestly a bittersweet experience, on one hand I’m obviously sad that it’s over and on the other, I’m so glad I finally got this over with. No longer did I need to stress over sponsorship, venue or spend entire days in a slack huddle.
The next few days were just spent sorting pictures, emailing and messaging sponsors and sharing pictures/promotional materials with them.
Campfire Toronto was a pretty scuffed event from the organizer’s perspective and here are my thoughts on why.
What Went Wrong?
Well, what didn’t go wrong?
Disorganized Team
I’d say more or less the organizers experience felt pretty disorganized, we didn’t have clear roles set up for the majority of the time. This obviously led to poor productivity and frustration. We also had a relatively large organizing team as we merged with Campfire Oakville, and that didn’t make it any easier.
Venue
We didn’t have a confirmed venue for the event even 2 days before the event itself. This was mainly in part due to us not focusing and going all in on venue outreach at the start and relying on Shopify to give us their space. This led us to eventually have to pay to rent a venue.
Sponsorship Money
Companies like to take their sweet time when replying and paying out invoices. So we were essentially broke and had zero money for our venue 2 days before the event. This also led us, as organizers to front some money ourselves to make this event possible.
Overall everything felt pretty last minute for this event, and I’m sure most of this could have been avoided if we had just planned it better.
For anyone who’s looking forward to organizing a hackathon, don’t let this scuffed experience discourage you, Instead you should learn from the mistakes we made and follow the tips down below to ensure your organizing experience is as smooth as possible.
3 Tips For Running A Hackathon
Have a leader
I cannot stress how important this is. You need to have a person on the team leading people at all time. Their job is to assign people roles, give them tasks, hold them accountable, and overall just manage the team. Leadership doesn’t need to be a fixed or assigned role. Anyone willing to step up, take initiative, and guide the team can lead when it matters.
Stop collaborating
I know this sounds weird but hear me out, too much collaboration can actually slow things down. Good collaboration looks like getting direction and feedback when you need it. Bad collaboration is turning every small decision into a long discussion.
If you were chosen as an organizer, it’s because you’re strong in a specific area. Take ownership of that. Move things forward, make decisions, and don’t wait on constant input from others.
This was certainly a problem we faced during Campfire Toronto, having 10 people in a huddle “collaborating” was far less productive, and more frustrating, than letting 2 or 3 people take ownership and move things forward.
Have a set timeline
I’d strongly recommend building a timeline for your event with clear weekly goals. That might look like reaching out to a set number of companies, contacting venues by a certain date, finalizing designs on schedule, publishing posts on time, and placing orders before deadlines.
Without a timeline, you end up trying to juggle everything in your head, which creates unnecessary stress and makes it much harder to stay organized.
Conclusion
Looking back, running Campfire Toronto was definitely an experience (can’t decided if it was a good one or bad one lol). It was definitely incredibly chaotic and stressful but also incredibly rewarding at the same time. Almost everyone that could go wrong went wrong, and there’s plenty of things we’d change, but overall seeing everything come together made it worth it.
Would I do it again?
I’d definitely run this again. Hackathons like these create meaningful, memorable experiences, and being able to organize something like that is incredibly rewarding. I’d just aim to do it better next time.
As a matter of fact, I am already on part of the organizers team for a bigger Toronto hackathon that’s going to happen this August :D I can’t catch a break.