Klaus admits that the formation of Bedtime Digital Games is “an unusual way to start.” However, his school took full advantage of the opportunities in Denmark for students making games.

Denmark is a relatively small country so all game educational institutions kind of “knew each other, so there is a initiative that had a collaborative semester meeting students all over for half a year to make games,” Klaus comments. This program allowed students all over to meet people from various backgrounds to compose a game and to maximize the efficiency. A program that “was setup to fail” Klaus remembers. It also was “meant to be a pressure cooker to make a pot of mistakes really fast and learn a lot.” At the time, eighteen students were working together on Klaus’s student project. The main idea of the program was to have students make a prototype that would have promise commercially. After the prototype was completed, his team stripped it down to core people, got funded, and took it to the finish line.

Identifying Winners

When asked about how the team was able to wind down from eighteen people to core developers, Klaus shares that “it gets really easy when working with someone for two weeks. Some people are team players and you can easily identify people's interest in startups and flourish. And others are attracted to bigger organization, to get the most out of the talent.”

Game Jamming

The team of students set out with making a prototype in a week with all eighteen students contributing. There were many trial and error to help the team get to know each other. The core setup of the program is to complete a prototype after six weeks which pushed the producers to get everything organized very fast. Subsequently, roles were defined at the beginning of the projects and “how everyone held each other responsible, was up for the team to find out.”