Filament Games Blog

How to Design the First Five Minutes of Your Game

A common request when pitching a game idea is “walk me through the first 5 minutes (or sometimes 30 seconds) of your game.” It is a question designed to weed out who has really thought out their ideas. The truth of the matter is that you need to convey a lot information concisely and elegantly…

January 23, 2017 // Stephen Calender

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Success Story: EkStep

The global game-based learning marketplace is growing and we’re excited to support that growth through new partnerships. Our partnership with Bangalore-based company EkStep is helping to bring game-based learning to millions of students in India. In India, nearly 75% of fifth grade students cannot do division and 25% of children drop out of school before they…

January 18, 2017 // Kat Shanahan

Preventing Defects And Defensive Programming

As programmers, we can embed fail-safes into our code. In essence, we get decide what failure looks like. As we are writing code we choose how rigorously we validate our work; for example, checking that values are not null, lists are not empty, or numbers stay within valid ranges. In the event that something bad…

January 11, 2017 // Stephen Calender

Speed Sketch! Winter Wonderland

What better way to start the new year than with a new Speed Sketch! Follow along as Game Art Team Lead Natasha Soglin creates this this enchanting landscape. Natasha created this piece in 60 minutes to experiment with color palette and mood. Have questions for Natasha? Get in touch via Facebook or Twitter! In the mood for more Speed…

January 9, 2017 // Kat Shanahan

Features That Add Value

When I provide insight into game development, instead of talking about specific games, the conversation revolves around the building blocks of games we call features. Through analyzing the atomic elements of games and how they can be combined and work together, we hope to learn generic lessons that can be applied to all games. If…

December 14, 2016 // Stephen Calender

Moving From Learning Objectives to Game Mechanics

Whenever we start a project, it’s pretty common for us to not have a formal finished pitch. Early concepts and proposal aside, there is still a giant gap between “here’s what we’d like our users to know” and “this is what the game is like”. It’s nuts! We love it! Years ago, Matt Haselton and I…

December 7, 2016 // Dan Norton

Success Story: McGraw-Hill Education

McGraw-Hill Education is one of the most successful and innovative educational publishers, and we’re honored to partner with them on Inspire Science. Earlier this year we worked with the team at McGraw-Hill to create a suite of four forward-facing science games designed to help teachers engage students and improve results in STEM education. Inspire Science represents…

November 28, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

Speed Sketch! Happy Thanksgiving from Filament Games

We’re thankful for the organizations, educators, and administrators that have partnered with us to bring game-based learning to millions of students around the world. Throughout the course of the year we’ve had the pleasure of working with outstanding organizations such as iCivics, EkStep, and McGraw-Hill Education to create games that are used globally to teach civics,…

November 23, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

How VR Changes Learning

If you’re like me, you can’t put a VR headset on without dreaming about the possibilities for learning. From a design perspective, VR affords the opportunity to place the learner in any conceivable environment, and more importantly, to make it interactive. That’s profoundly exciting. Filament has already completed its first educational VR project for a…

November 14, 2016 // Dan White

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

4 Tips for Creating Successful Client Relationships

We’ve had a lot of amazing clients over the years here at Filament. When your day-to-day job is to design creative projects that help people, you wind up meeting a ton of incredible people. But it’s not always rosy- making learning games is a risky, strange process with a lots of twists and turns. Ideas…

November 9, 2016 // Dan Norton

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