gamedesign Archives | Page 4 of 16

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

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Incorporating VR into Your Business Strategy

Virtual Reality (VR) is an exciting new technology with a lot of potential, and we’ve spoken to a number of folks who are already exploring ways to augment their businesses with VR. As a technology that provides new modes of interaction and information consumption, VR is highly attractive to corporate trainers, nonprofits with a message,…

October 12, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

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

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

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

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

Designing for the Spectrum of VR Devices

We’re unpacking our philosophy for designing games across the whole spectrum of VR devices – highlighting examples of recent projects along the way!

February 17, 2021 // James LaPierre

The 4 P’s of Designing Learning Games with Impact

iCivics is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinvigorating civic learning through interactive and engaging learning resources. Their platform has more than 7 million registered students and 100,000 registered teachers in all 50 United States. The article below is written by iCivics Director of Content Carrie Ray-Hill and shares valuable insights into creating mission-driven game-based learning tools.…

January 26, 2017 // Carrie Ray-Hill

Multisensory Learning in the Digital Age

The following is a client guest blog post from Square Panda, for whom we recently developed Square Panda Bubbles, Square Panda Monster Rhymes and Square Panda Jiggity Jamble. Have you ever danced to learn a new letter of the alphabet? Research shows that employing multiple senses may have significant benefits for learning new skills. Multisensory learning…

February 8, 2017 // Vera Blau-McCandliss Ph.D.

The Importance of Feedback

I’ve previously quoted Sid Meier who believes one way to think about game design is “a series of interesting decisions“. Besides game designers, there are a few other professions that obsess over human behavior with a particular focus on the choices we make; namely, psychologists and economists. They study phenomenon that expose flaws in how we…

February 16, 2017 // Stephen Calender

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