Filament Games Blog

Making Games that Learn

There’s a lot we can learn playing games – from Newtonian physics to object-oriented coding, games can make us more capable and more informed. But here’s a thought that might sound a little ridiculous: what can games learn from us? According to today’s article from Fast Company, Unity Technologies is looking to answer that very question. Yesterday…

September 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

Augmented Reality and Training

We’ve been talking a lot about VR lately, but the world of XR content and experiences is wide and inclusive of mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), and more, each with its own set of strengths and applications. MR is a broad term that describes content situated “anywhere between the extrema of the virtuality continuum”[1].…

September 18, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Game-Based Learning Research Roundup 2017

As game-based learning finds its way into the mainstream of teaching modalities, questions about efficacy will naturally start to surface. Fortunately, there’s a significant amount of research available to help drive this conversation in a positive direction, and more research gets generated and highlighted every year. To help you sort through it all, we’ve assembled…

September 11, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Unity for Education – An Interview with Jessica Lindl

The Filament Games blog team recently sat down to talk with Jessica Lindl, Global Head of Education at Unity, to talk through their plans and aspirations around the education industry. Here’s what she had to say: Tell us about yourself. What’s your professional background? I’ve spent my entire career in Education. From the beginning, I’ve…

September 6, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Museums and Interactivity at the New York Hall of Science

The State of the Art This is an amazing time to be creating media for museums and other informal learning spaces. I’m the creative producer at the NY Hall of Science (NYSCI). I came to NYSCI in 2011 to work on Connected Worlds, a 2400 square foot immersive, interactive space created by Design I/O. The…

August 28, 2017 // Geralyn Abinader

Speed Sketch! Character Concept – Hot Dog Hawk

Character concepting is always a fun exercise – whether your character is serious, silly, or something in between, bringing a new character to life is a thought-provoking endeavor with lots of little details to consider. We wanted to unpack this process, so Game Art Team Lead Natasha Soglin crafted the speed sketch below, in which…

August 22, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

The Return of the Learning Games

At the recent Games for Change Festival, Constance Steinkuehler displayed Gartner’s time-honored “hype cycle” and posited that learning games are somewhere on the Slope of Enlightenment (likely closer to the Trough than the Plateau). The Game Based Learning (GBL) space is idiosyncratic and will likely have a unique adoption curve (including multiple hype cycles), but…

August 16, 2017 // Dan White

Five Years of Game Art

When I was hired here at Filament five years ago, I had a lot to learn. Back then, the first tool I learned was Flash. You remember Adobe Flash, right? In recent times it has put on a new logo and has been masquerading around as “Animate CC” but lo, it is the exact same…

August 9, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

Walden and ELA Games for Learning

With Games for Change awarding Most Significant Impact and Game of the Year to Walden, a Game, there’s a lot of attention right now on the type of game that Walden represents – that is, narrative games, which fall more broadly into the category of English Language Arts (ELA) games. As a game named after a…

August 3, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Highlights from a Decade of Learning Games

What does a decade of learning games look like? Filament Games has been around making learning games and taking names since 2005, which was so long ago that smartphones weren’t even a thing at the time. A lot has changed about the world since then, and correspondingly, a lot has changed about how we design…

July 31, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

A Look Back at our 2023 Releases

What We Mean When We Say AI: Understanding Types of AI

Resource Roundup: 2023 at Filament Games