Dan Norton Archives | Filament Games

What impact do you want to make on the world?

“Impact” is a broad term that can have diverse meanings, dependent on an organization’s resources and objectives. Like many of our partners, you might approach us with your desired impact already in mind – however, plenty of organizations come to us seeking both our game development services as well as advice on how to maximize…

April 4, 2019 // Alex Stone, Dan Norton, Dan White

Game Design with AI

Welcome to the inaugural post of our new series where we discuss artificial intelligence and its impact on game development at large and at our studio! In this game design edition, we include the insights and experiences of Filament Games’ Chief Creative Officer, Dan Norton, as he navigates the intersection of AI and game design.…

April 3, 2024 // Dan Norton

Balancing Fun and Learning in Educational Game Design

Creating an educational game that is both engaging and educational is a challenge that requires careful consideration and craftsmanship. How do we do it? We’re glad you asked. We recently sat down with our Chief Creative Officer, Dan Norton, to answer that very question! In this interview, we explore the key considerations and strategies for…

July 10, 2023 // Dan Norton

Game Design Best Practices: Games for Adult Learning

This month on the blog, we’re featuring a variety of topics related to educational video games and adult learners. Earlier, we talked to Quality Assurance Manager Brian Czech about his QA best practices for games for adult learners. For today’s blog, we interviewed our Chief Creative Officer, Dan Norton, about design best practices for adult…

May 18, 2022 // Dan Norton

Educational Game Design: A Three-Pronged Approach

At Filament Games, we’ve developed a strategy for mapping educational content into gameplay mechanics, effectively using the design process to align how people have fun when playing games with the way they learn. Based on the theory of Jim Gee, our design process codes learning objectives into one of three categories, and uses the unique…

April 18, 2022 // Dan Norton

Game Spotlight: Convene the Council (iCivics)

Hey there, I’m Dan Norton, Chief Creative Officer at Filament Games. Once again we’ve had the privilege of teaming up with the fine folks at iCivics to create another great civics game, this time called Convene the Council. Convene the Council? What’s it about? In Convene the Council, you step into the constrictive, but nice-looking…

March 21, 2022 // Dan Norton

How to Get Hired at a Game Studio: Game Designer Edition 2021

In our How to Get Hired series, we interview hiring managers all about their departments, their best practices for success at Filament Games, and qualities in applications and applicants that make an impression. For this installment in the 2021 reboot of this series, we interviewed Chief Creative Officer, Dan Norton! See our previous How to…

November 24, 2021 // Dan Norton

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Prototyping, Clients, and ‘The Fidelity Rainbow’

CCO Dan Norton discusses how his ‘Fidelity Rainbow’ metaphor helps facilitate communication and creative collaboration when prototyping games with clients!

February 10, 2020 // Dan Norton

Making Great Learning Games Pt. 2 – Designing Game Mechanics

Hello again! Welcome to part 2 of Making Great Learning Games! Last article we covered how to identify your actual learning objectives and how to formulate a plan for transferring them from the play experience to the real world. Now the next step is migrating those objectives into gameplay mechanics! I don’t want to speak…

October 7, 2019 // Dan Norton

Making Great Learning Games Pt. 1 – Defining Learning Objectives

Drawing on over a decade of experience developing educational games, CCO Dan Norton offers a look at the core elements of designing great learning games…

September 30, 2019 // Dan Norton