Are You Just a Guy? A Bystander-Training Game

An interactive Reddit game that teaches empathy, consent, and bystander awareness through real-life scenarios, humor, and reflection.

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Inspiration

“Are You Just a Guy?” was created by two developers with non-traditional backgrounds: my co-developer, a Safety & Reliability engineer, and me - a chemical engineer currently pursuing my master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at Johns Hopkins University. Neither of us are professional programmers, but we share a conviction that technology can teach empathy.

For me, this project came from my own experience as a black woman who has experienced years of harassment in public spaces, from unwanted comments to being chased down streets in broad daylight. Years of this slowly created isolation. There were months when I hardly went outside because I did not have the emotional energy to physically have to defend and look out for myself. I took martial arts to reclaim a sense of control, yet the empowerment that training gave me was always private and physical. Building this game felt like I was finally pushing back on a collective level, transforming pain into something that might reach thousands of people and spark reflection in spaces where it is most needed.

What it does

The game lives entirely inside Reddit through its new Devvit Web platform. Players encounter short, realistic scenarios inspired by real-world behavior, things that actually come from confession threads or relationship subreddits. Each scene places the player in a social situation that tests how they would respond when witnessing disrespect or boundary-crossing behavior.

Every choice affects a “Trash Meter,” a progress bar that tracks personal growth from “Embarrassing” to “Golden Retriever.” The humor in those levels keeps the tone approachable while encouraging honest self-assessment. Behind that simplicity, the scenarios are meant to subconsciously teach evidence-based frameworks such as the 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention and DEARMAN communication strategies. The result is part game, part social experiment, a mirror that lets players practice accountability in low-stakes, story-driven situations.

How we built it

The project uses a React and TypeScript frontend, an Express backend, and Redis for quick data storage. We built it to render inline inside Reddit posts, so users can play as they scroll without opening a pop-up.

The centerpiece is the Trash Meter, a gradient bar with avatars positioned along it to visualize progress. The player’s own Reddit avatar floats and animates on the bar to mark their current level, giving immediate, visual feedback after each decision. This micro-interaction makes the learning process feel playful rather than judgmental.

Because both of us came from engineering disciplines outside of software, Kiro was indispensable. It became the third member of our team, translating our ideas into clean, working code. Through Kiro’s steering and feedback, we refined the entire interface: removing unnecessary elements, improving color balance, and implementing the dynamic avatar behavior that now defines the experience. Kiro helped us debug deployment issues with Reddit’s Devvit CLI, guided us through version conflicts, and ensured our components were fully type-safe in TypeScript.

Most notably, Kiro helped us build the avatar-flipping system: avatars automatically face the center of the bar when positioned on the right side, giving the visual impression of characters acknowledging one another. This small detail created personality and cohesion across the interface, making the Trash Meter feel alive.

Working with Kiro transformed our development workflow. Instead of being stuck in syntax errors or slow trial-and-error cycles, we could iterate quickly, polish animations, and stay focused on design intent. It made us feel like professional developers for the first time, not just hobbyists piecing things together.

The speed, clarity, and confidence that Kiro brought to our workflow allowed us to spend more energy on storytelling and ethics instead of pure debugging. That shift in focus is what turned this from a prototype into a finished, responsive Reddit game.

Kiro helped us clean and adapt the experiences fetched from real Reddit posts into playable scenarios.

Challenges we ran into

At the beginning of the project, we were using Cursor.ai, and it was such a process. We spent about a week and a half struggling to make progress. The game was not displaying properly, our commits were not even showing up on GitHub, and everything felt stuck. The presentation of the game inside Reddit was messy, and we could not figure out how to manage the structure between the front end and the back end.

When we finally switched to Kiro, everything changed. Within just a few hours, we were able to finish what had taken us over a week to even begin. The difference was that Kiro did not just generate code, it helped us think through the project as a system, almost like a project manager that understood our intentions. Learning how Kiro worked was a challenge at first, because it is very different from the other AI agents we had used and very new meaning there were not many forums discussing how to use it. There is the specification part, the steering, and the hooks system, and understanding how those work together took time. But once we understood it, we realized how powerful that approach is. Kiro is designed in a way that is genuinely project-management friendly, and it allowed us to focus on what we were building and why, instead of just getting lost in code.

Working with Kiro transformed our development workflow. Instead of being stuck in syntax errors or slow trial-and-error cycles, we could iterate quickly, polish animations, and stay focused on design intent. It made us feel like professional developers, not just hobbyists piecing things together. The speed, clarity, and confidence that Kiro brought to our workflow allowed us to spend more energy on storytelling and ethics instead of pure debugging. That shift in focus is what turned this from a prototype into a finished, responsive Reddit game.

We also created a small auxiliary script that uses Reddit’s API to fetch real posts from specific subreddits connected to respect, dating, and relationships. From there, Kiro helped us clean and adapt these authentic experiences into playable scenarios.

Kiro made this possible. Through its guidance, we implemented the dynamic avatar-flipping system that gives the Trash Meter life and personality, cleaned the interface, and ensured full TypeScript safety. It helped us manage version control, resolve Devvit build conflicts, and polish the animations that now define the app. Most importantly, it allowed us to focus on the “why” of the design instead of getting stuck in the “how.”

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we are most proud of is that instead of inventing fictional stories, we grounded the game in real posts written by real people, shortened and edited to protect identity but still carrying the emotional truth of what people have lived. These situations are not theoretical, they are lived experiences turned into opportunities for reflection and empathy.

This approach not only makes the game more relatable, it also lays a foundation for potential real-world training tools. In professional environments, companies already hold workshops on emotional intelligence and workplace respect. A system like ours, driven by true community data, could eventually provide interactive training modules that help employees practice being an ally through genuine, community-based stories.

Personally, this project gave me more empowerment than any martial-arts belt or self-defense drill ever could. It let me speak back to a culture that makes me feel unsafe. I wanted to channel years of frustration into something constructive, to meet people where they already are, scrolling Reddit, laughing, learning, and thinking about what accountability looks like.

Every time the Trash Meter moves upward and an avatar climbs from “Just a Guy” to “Decent Human,” it feels like a tiny victory against the silence that keeps harassment normalized.

What we learned

What we learning is really the power of AI. We were jumping up and down in shock by the fact that this tool exists and that we could use it in our individual projects as startups founders. This really showed us that AI can now handle sophisticated, multi-layered projects by leading with specifications, almost like an engineering manager who understands intent, dependencies, and integration.

I was personally amazed by how the Kiro App, and AI agents like it, actually manage your computer. They can open and use your terminal, install dependencies, push to GitHub, and even deploy your project online. They do not just help write code, they handle the entire development environment, ensuring that every piece needed for the project to function is installed and properly configured. Seeing an AI agent not only understand what to build but also set up everything required to build it was mind-blowing.

What's next for Are You Just a Guy? A Bystander-Training Game

“Are You Just a Guy?” has become more than a hackathon entry, it is proof that empathy can be designed, taught, and played. It blends humor with self-reflection, turning familiar internet culture into a tool for awareness.

Kiro made that possible by bridging the gap between vision and execution for two engineers who wanted to build something good. I hope the game continues to grow, not just as entertainment, but as a gentle, humorous way for people, especially men, to ask themselves, “Am I just a guy, or am I becoming better?”

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