Eva Vela and Gabriel Alcaide are two young recent graduates in industrial design engineering from the Elisava School of Design who have turned a degree project into a future business initiative.
Based on a homework assignment for a packaging course in which they were asked to create an educational game for children using ink stamps, they have embarked on a process of product development and business definition that is expected to be a reexit. As Alcaide explains, Byodo was born to create only the packaging for a game, as the course work required, but they were determined to make it fun and began to design a game to help put an end to the negative burden that mathematics has on children.
And the project did not die once it had been handed in to the teacher, but it took off more and more. A year later, when Vela and Alcaide were third-year students, they began to develop the second part of Byodo together. For the communication subject, they had to simulate presenting themselves on a crowfunding platform to raise funds, and they recovered the idea of Byodo for this subject as well. They continued to develop the game from the point of view of product design. And from this learning process, they ended up generating their own campaign on the Kickstarter platform.
Byodo thus became Vela and Alcaide's TFG (final year project). "Until now, all the TFGs that were done were in collaboration with another company, but they proposed a new TFG model that consists of creating the product but also the company that will take it to the market, and we accepted", explains Vela. Vela explains. So, in addition to the game, they went on to specify all aspects of entrepreneurship. Alcaide focused on the technical and creative development of the pieces and Vela on the rest and, in turn, they were defining the educational benefits of this playful proposal.
With the TFG, they finished the product and analysed its production cost and the whole business plan. Then they decided to rethink the model to make it more affordable, and last November they resumed the initiative, launched the crowfunding campaign, created the entire communication campaign and launched the adventure. "We have entered a totally unknown and difficult world, but I think we made the right decision to make a quality product with everything thought out," says Eva Vela.
The two young people could have sold the idea to a publisher and made a profit from their university project, but they decided not to disassociate themselves from it and to start defining a business initiative that would allow them to control the game's arrival on the market.
So today Byodo is not a single game, but a system, whose elements can be used to create different types of proposals. In this sense, Byodo works in much the same way as traditional card games, the only difference being that the main mechanics of the game are based on mathematical operations. The pieces make it possible to create manipulable chains of equations from propositions.
(ANNA PINTER,2023) Via: leconomic.cat