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Writing a Game Design Document Your Team Can Actually Use

*claps hands together loudly* “Alrighty, who’s ready to read my 30-page GDD that I spent the last two days writing?!” Yeah, me neither. I’ve seen a number of game design documents get out of hand and become a chore to maintain and read. They end up looking more like a wall of text than a…

October 20, 2014 // Abby Friesen

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

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

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

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

Appealing to your Buyer with Games: Tips for Educational Publishers

As an educational publisher, you are most likely keeping a close eye on the digital educational publishing landscape and see that game-based learning is an important component of it. Whether you have already implemented game-based learning into your product strategy or are just starting to think about it, I encourage you to visit Digital Game-Based…

October 24, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Building Creative Practices: Holacracy

The last installment of this Building Creative Practices series talked about employing sound strategies for communication in the context of some common organizational structures and challenging dispositions. Since you’ve all read that article and are at this point colleague-whisperers and conjurers of consensus, I thought today’s installment could focus on an uncommon organizational structure – namely,…

October 13, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

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

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your EdTech Pilot

EdTech purchasing is a complex process with many stakeholders. Administrators, educators, students and the surrounding community all have a vested interest in knowing that your next purchase will offer real value to your institution, whether you’re purchasing at the school or district level. It’s tough to weather that level of scrutiny! You can certainly ask…

September 26, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

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