Spotlight on Studios: Dreams Uncorporated in Bucaramanga, Colombia
Photo courtesy of Dreams Uncorporated
CEO Carlos Rocha Silva and his team at Dreams Uncorporated work from a game design studio in the quiet city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. The twenty or more designers don’t only gather to work; the studio also hosts team dinner parties, often organized around a theme. The most recent one? Dishes inspired by video games, of course.
As part of our Spotlight on Studios series, we asked Carlos about what he’s working on now—excitingly, the answer is an Endless project—and the educational values he believes games can promote.
Q. What is your team working on right now?
Carlos: A game called The Maze. It’s a third person adventure game where you take the role of Ada, an adventurer who has fallen into a dimension known as The Maze. There, she has to reprogram the computers that oversee the world so she can escape back home. The goal of this game is to introduce young kids to the basic concepts of computer programming.
The key values we want to foster are creativity and problem-solving skills. That’s why we’re including an “Expert Mode” that allows the player to freely write her own code (albeit within a sandbox) and see the effect it has on the game environment. We even wrote a code editor with proper syntax highlighting for that!
Q. What drives your team to work on this kind of project?
Carlos: As a game studio, we see the power of creativity and problem solving every day. From a new game mechanic designed to express a powerful idea to the solutions we devise to overcome the technical challenges of game development, we see how creativity allows us to turn ambitious and seemingly impossible ideas into real products.
It could be said that we’re creating the game developers of tomorrow. But, more broadly, we’re also creating the engineers of tomorrow; people who will find innovative solutions to the problems the world presents them. Often, mothers come to us to say how happy they are that their children, who love video games, have options as to what they can do professionally. It’s always a pleasure to tell them this is actually a great and fun way to live your dreams.
Q. Why work with Endless?
Carlos: We enjoy working with the Endless projects, and since one of their main audiences is young kids, we feel we’re really making a difference. We strongly believe kids today will be the professionals that build the world of tomorrow, and we want to prepare them for when that time comes. We believe we can make a difference by making these processes fun to learn.
Spotlight on Studios features the craft and creativity of game studios around the world.