From Tarb
Why I wanted to make room for this
The freedom I remember
When I think about growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I remember having time. Time to play outside, make up a world with friends, get something wrong, and come back with another idea. An afternoon could belong to us.
I didn’t have words for what that gave me then. Looking back, I see how much it mattered to have room to use my own judgment. My parents gave me a foundation, and adventure gave me chances to discover what it meant.
The world, a little at a time
When I was a kid, the evening news had time for the two or three biggest stories of the day and a couple from close to home. Then it was over. The world’s troubles reached me a little at a time, usually with a parent nearby to help me make sense of them.
There was no social media, either. If someone wanted to make fun of you, they had to do it to your face, often with a grown-up within earshot. If you were the one being unkind, you had to see the look on the other kid’s face. And when you went home, it stayed at school.
Kids today can reach far more of the world, at any hour, and some of it reaches them before they’re ready. If you’re raising a child now, you may remember at least part of a childhood that moved more slowly. I don’t think the answer is to shut the world out. But I believe a child still deserves some of what that slower pace gave me: time to grow into the hard things, one at a time.
What I wanted to make
I started Dino Defenders with that kind of room in mind. A place built for children, with adventures they could enjoy and characters they could get attached to. A place where they could encounter a hard choice, a mistake, or a fresh start from the safety of a story.
I knew what I wanted at its foundation: treating people with respect, giving a full effort, and taking pride in the work. Those are personal convictions. I’m willing to say plainly what they are and why I care about them.
Then comes the creative work: making a world a child wants to enter. The characters need their own personalities and problems. The adventure needs enough life that the child cares what happens next.
The part I leave to the child
I can choose what this world stands for. I can put those convictions into a character’s decisions and let the consequences play out. I can give a child something to wonder about.
I also want to leave space for a response I didn’t plan: a question, a different interpretation, a connection to something in their own life. I believe there’s real value in a discovery a child gets to make for themselves.
That’s what I’m working toward with Dino Defenders: a world built with care, enjoyed for the adventure, and open enough for children to find something of their own in it.
— Tarb