It's my dream to work with a programming veteran! The Experienced programmers don't usually have time to create Educational content. So working with one might be the best learning opportunity I have.
I'm free this entire year, I'm delaying signing up for colleague later, to see if this year I can make it in Game dev. Are you ok with using Godot? you can use any language, a lot of people made games with Rust and C# using Godot. If you're gonna use another engine, then I'm open to increasing my proficiency in other languages and trying different game engines. If you're making it in another engine or language, then tell me before hand, so I can get ready before the game jam begins.
Although I think Godot might be super powerful with a game engine engineer or one specialized in architecture, Godot has so much untapped power. It's designed in a way that you can easily change the architecture, do low level stuff when optimization is needed (Godot Servers, RenderingServer/PhysicsServer..), and use different frameworks and combine languages.
Here's my discord: yasrbaani