How Under 30 Honoree Jenny Xu Found Her Niche In Video Games – Forbes

Jenny Xu has never been one to toot her own horn. During her childhood in Northern California, she recalls being a “shy kid who loved drawing and wanted to be an artist.” Her fascination with games such as Pokemon and Neopets inspired her to create her own digital art, which she began posting anonymously to DeviantArt in middle school. When she was 12, her dad gifted her a copy of Adobe Flash, and upon using it to combine her art with a few lines of copy and pasted code, she unknowingly created her first video game. This game became the first of many, and Jenny soon earned herself a sizeable following within the online gaming community under the alias of “Chibixi.”

As Jenny immersed herself in game development, she began to attend trade shows and STEM pitch competitions during her free time to learn more about the industry. Feeling embarrassed by what she thought was a “nerdy” hobby, she never discussed her game development ambitions with her friends during high school. Looking back now, she realizes she was lucky to get into the field early in life, long before she knew how skewed the gender ratio was among developers. Jenny, now 22, has developed a total of 127 original video games and 10 mobile games over the past 10 years. 

“When I first started creating games, I hid behind my internet alias and would rarely talk about my games offline. As I got more involved with the online gaming community, I realized that everyone thought I was a guy, and I never really corrected them. To this day, many people I interact with online assume I am a man or only an artist, even though I always write that I am a woman and a developer in my profile.”

As a junior in high school, Jenny founded JCSoft, Inc. to release and distribute her games. To date, her mobile games have received more than 3.5 million downloads in the Google Play and iPhone App stores. Among her favorites is Seven Photos, a murder mystery game in which the player’s character wakes up with no memory and no possessions except a camera with seven photos in its reel. These photos must be used to extract clues in order to determine how the murder happened.

“A girl who had played [Seven Photos] once emailed me an essay about how she was so inspired by it that she decided to go into the gaming industry. Seeing that impact is really valuable to me and really drives me to keep going.”

Wanting to learn more about the science behind game design, Jenny enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after high school. Though she kept an open mind with regards to her future career, she knew early on that her dream was to launch her own game studio. Even then, she was unsure whether her games were worth discussing with her college friends, so she continued to compartmentalize her personal life and her gaming pursuits until she was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Games during her junior year.

“After I was recognized in Forbes, I was kind of forced to talk about it. People started asking me more about my games, and I finally realized that people liked what I made and thought it was cool.”

With this newfound confidence, Jenny became more vocal about her work in games during her senior year at MIT. She gave talked at the annual Game Developers Conference, volunteered at various gaming summits, and founded Game On Girls, a student organization that connected local Boston game developers with female MIT students. The club hosted dinners and “speed mentoring” events where students were matched with industry mentors based on their interests. Though other gaming affinity clubs already existed at MIT, Jenny hoped to increase discourse with the industry and to foster mentor/mentee relationships like the ones that helped her early in her own career. 

“When I first started pursuing game development, I was lucky to meet a few other women at industry events who ended up serving as mentors for years afterwards. They gave me confidence that I was making a difference, and that I wasn’t just an amateur. I stayed in contact with some of them throughout high school and MIT, and I’m very grateful to all of them for their help.”

In December 2018, Jenny completed her bachelor’s degree one semester early with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Comparative Media Studies. Since then, she has continued her work as Founder and Lead Game Developer at JCSoft, where she collaborates with her family on new game releases and hopes to hire her first employees in the near future. In November 2019, JCSoft won Niantic’s Beyond Reality Developer Contest with Run To My Heart, a new augmented reality (AR) fitness game developed using Niantic’s Real World Platform technology.

As one of the gaming industry’s youngest trailblazers, Jenny encourages others to pursue their dreams, even if they don’t yet feel they are ready.

“If you want to do something, just start doing it. There’s a lot of initial activation energy needed to start a project, but sometimes if you just start it, that’s all you need to get rolling. Only after creating little things along the way and putting yourself out there are you going to get better. Remember: You don’t have to be perfect.”