Probably one of my worst this year, aha.
Long post incoming.
I'm a first year university student who studies games development (yep, it's an actual course). Today was the deadline for our first Unity game; we had to make a project that lasted for at least 3 minutes and demonstrated the programming skills we'd learned in the lectures.
My game was inspired by an indie game called Overcooked, and I managed to do it quite easily because of my prior knowledge with the engine and coding in other languages similar to C#. My friends on the course didn't really know the language however, so I spent the past 3 weeks staying behind after lectures to help them with their code - sometimes to a point where I'd just write it for them.
Some of my friends would pick it up easily, but others were really struggling - one person didn't know what an integer was, and the deadline for the game was less than a week away. Nonetheless I tried to help them all make some pretty cool games and in the end I was quite jealous of what they'd done - they looked better than mine, but I felt as though my programming had been a lot better; I spent a lot longer programming my game than designing it (the criteria stated that 50% of marks were due to development, and only 10% due to design).
Fast forward to today and we had to present our games. One of my friends went first, and his game ended up getting a first; he got 85, which ended up as the highest score in the class. For someone who had not programmed before, that was pretty sweet.
Another friend went next, and his game scored 85 as well. It all seemed to be going well for our group; we'd stayed behind every day for three weeks, worked hard and finally we were seeing the results.
Next up was a friend who really, really struggled in the course. His game was simple: it had 5 (really random) levels, where you'd have to get a ball to a destination. I helped him out a lot with his game, and I was sure that I'd written more code for his game than he had. At times it was frustrating because I felt he didn't even know the basics of coding (he didn't know what an integer was). Nonetheless, his score was 70 - a first.
I was next. During my "presentation" (we were just sat down whilst we explained the games, but we had to talk the lecturer through how it played), the lecturer kept interrupting me to talk about things that y game reminded her about. She took a few minutes to show the class an Itch.io bundle that was on sale a few weeks ago, and then to show a trailer for a game, and finally to show another trailer. My final score was 68.
I understand that the pass mark is 40, and that I should be happy that I still passed, but it is crushing to receive a score lower than your friends who knew nothing about programming prior to the course, and prior to me helping them to make their games. All I could think about was the three weeks I spent helping others with their games, only for karma to repay me in the worst way.
Another person in the class received 55. He had a good top-down shooter, but it was just made up of cubes and cylinders - sort of similar to mine (though mine had textures and UI). However, the lecturer asked to see his code and ended up giving him 85 because his code demonstrated that he'd understood the course's content.
I think this is what ruined my day the most; the fact that my game has 23 different C# files (I know it's quality over quantity. I agree.) and that she didn't even ask to look at my game's scripts once. The guy who got 70, the one who isn't really too confident at coding, has a total of 4 scripts in his game - probably around 80 lines or so in total. Considering 50% of the marks are programming, I was astonished.
What was most crushing - at the end of the day - was that none of my friends who got firsts thanked me. When we were coding their games, they'd say "thanks" and such, but now - when it actually matters - none of them actually thanked me. I don't want to appear arrogant; I'm not that type of person, but when I've spent over three weeks helping you to make your game work - the least you could do is say "oh, thanks!". Instead, they just posted on Facebook saying that they scored 85, as though they'd done it all by themselves. Don't get me wrong - I'm really happy for them; they worked very hard and deserved it, but I'd just appreciate some recognition.
TL;DR: There's (probably) no such thing as positive karma. Most people are only out for themselves at the end of the day. No matter how much you're there for people - they'll still watch you fall.