Coworking EOI / ADA

https://www.diariodejerez.es/jerez/emprendedores-salto-mercado-presentan-proyectos-jerez_0_2006828037.html

The first thing I did to prep for my Demo Day was scan Jesús de Sobrino's face.

I asked him to sit down, processed his face, and a few days later I had a MetaHuman version of Jesús introducing himself on screen, changing his hair and clothes in real time.
When you think about it, that's a pretty odd thing to ask of the person running your program.
He said yes without hesitation, and I'm genuinely grateful for it.

I've been doing this for a while now: characters, clothing, grooms, real flesh-and-blood people poured into a world that doesn't exist.
I think building was never my problem.
I walked into the EOI coworking in December knowing how to make the product (although there's always room for improvement) and with almost no clue about everything around it: who I sell it to, why they'd buy from me and not someone else, how to talk about it without sounding fake.

Five months on, that part is still the hard part, but at least now I know which tricks actually work.

I owe a lot of that to Eduardo Cambil, my mentor during the program, who patiently pulled me out of the technician's head and put me into the place of someone who has to sell what he makes.

Most of what holds Frontera Realms together today got decided in those sessions.
The other half of the learning came from the people I shared the room with.
There were ten projects, and nine of them had nothing to do with pixels or games.

To be honest, at first I assumed someone who didn't speak my language had little to offer.
Turns out it's the opposite: the one from hospitality, the one from consulting, whoever, they ask you things you'd already filed away as obvious and that weren't obvious at all.

Demo Day was the moment all of that work landed in the same room.

Jesús's face up on screen, a room full of projects that looked nothing alike, and me showing the product actually running.
I took the “I'd rather show than tell” approach: one character moving through different worlds and contexts, so the modularity of my assets spoke for itself.

So I ended with something I can show, measure, and put up for sale, and with the certainty that the hard part starts now, outside the classroom, where there's no mentor left to grade your exercise.

Thanks to Eduardo for being so close and involved, to Jesús for his good nature, and to my classmates, for not looking at me like a weirdo when I started going on about hair and dolls. Not too much, at least.