engineering Archives - Page 3 of 4

iCivics Suite Updates: How The Art Evolved

Filament Games and iCivics.org have shared a long and prosperous relationship over the years, during which they have created nineteen learning games together. These games have been played in all 50 states by students and educators alike, teaching a wide variety of civics topics from basic American rights and judicial processes to the fundamental structure of…

April 3, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Introducing unity3d-pixi

In education, technology moves more slowly than in the consumer world. Institutions must eke all of the value out of their existing hardware, and even when they do make new hardware purchases, the hardware is still not requisitioned with games in mind. This means that when we are charged with building software that is accessible…

March 23, 2017 // Alex Stone

Major League Hacking

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of serving as a judge for MadHacks, the Madison, WI chapter of Major League Hacking (MLH). MLH bills itself as the official student hackathon league, and rightly so! This event was serious business. MLH works with thousands of students on an annual basis, holding over 200 weekend-long invention…

March 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

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

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

Future-Proofing Your Project

Technology is an ever-changing landscape. There are constant stories about the death of platforms, new ‘game-changing’ software or hardware, and wild successes or tragic failures for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Let’s explore how you can mitigate those risks and develop a project that has a lifespan measured in years. Selecting Technology One of the first decisions…

September 22, 2016 // Stephen Calender

Taking Your Game From Version 1.0 to 2.0

I have written about the importance of considering cost during the early stages of project development, and provided a broad overview of what to expect during the production process. Now that you’ve officially launched the game, you may be considering taking your project to version 2.0. Before developing ideas on how to best position your project for…

September 8, 2016 // Stephen Calender

FGP2-11: VR & Identity

Welcome to episode 11. This week, Engineering Director Arthur Low joins us in the studio to discuss the relationship between Virtual Reality and identity. We also try to decide on a name for a “VR room” and find out if Brandon can make a comeback in Fact or Fabrication. Hot Topics in This Week’s Episode…

August 15, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

HTML5 and WebGL

WebGL, like HTML5, is an agreed upon standard that browser software will support. It is based on OpenGL, which is the most widely adopted graphics standard in computing. This means that instead of relying on plug-ins, modern browsers can support rich content and advanced features without installing additional software. Specifically, WebGL allows for hardware accelerated graphics…

July 13, 2016 // Stephen Calender

5 Assessment Strategies in Learning Games

Every game we create at Filament Games is specifically tailored to meet pre-determined learning objectives. With this commitment to achieving learning objectives comes unique challenges in measuring the learning that occurs during gameplay. Prior to releasing games, we conduct playtests with members of our target audience and sometimes commission independent case studies that include pre…

June 1, 2016 // Stephen Calender

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