Pop and I are the story nerds in this group of 21 kids. We spent our past individual self designed challenges working on some sort of writing. So it was no surprise that when we were given challenges according to our interests, we were tasked with meeting with someone who develops games for a living
The beginning of the day kicked off with research, which, obviously, was fairly easy. We had no trouble looking up indie developers in the Denver area. We soon learned that there was a studio less than a block away from our hostel.
This made both of us fairly complacent. I ended up falling asleep for about an hour until Pop woke me up. It was around 1 at this point, so we went to eat lunch. After lunch, we walked to the studio to meet with the developers. To our despair, we learned that we needed to set up an appointment in order to meet.
So now, with minimal time left, we tried to catch the bus to a board game store so we could talk with the owner. After 15 minutes, the bus still hadn’t arrived and daylight was being burnt.
In a last ditch effort, we walked to the library and read up on game design and programming theory.
Our challenge did not go as we planned. In hindsight, we could’ve done a little bit more contacting people early in the morning, setting up meetings. Parts of our challenges are failing and learning, and this is one of those learning challenges.