Stephen Calender - Filament Games

Selected articles by the author

September 18, 2015

Why Build Learning Games?

If you could create any game, what would you make? Would it be a chaotic universe where anyone can be a superhero, an epic intergalactic adventure, or a medieval fantasy world with wizards and dragons?

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Stephen Calender

October 14, 2015

Getting the Most out of HTML5

Quality matters. Your audience does not care about the technology you used to develop your game.

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Stephen Calender

November 9, 2015

How to Make a Video Game for Learning: Costs and Considerations

Game creation is more complicated than portrayed in Game Dev Story. I’m going to explain just how complicated it can be, but I have a few caveats: I can’t walk through every possible game feature (there are many and we make new ones all the time).

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Stephen Calender

January 4, 2016

How to Make a Learning Game

It Begins With An Idea Video games typically begin with design, either starting with a great idea or pursuing a creative solution to a tough problem.

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Stephen Calender

March 30, 2016

Get to Know a Game Engineer: An Interview with Stephen Calender

On March 9, 2016, I met with the Game Maker’s Club at Norwich Tech via Google Hangouts.

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Stephen Calender

June 1, 2016

5 Assessment Strategies in Learning Games

Every game we create at Filament Games is specifically tailored to meet pre-determined learning objectives.

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Stephen Calender

July 13, 2016

HTML5 and WebGL

WebGL, like HTML5, is an agreed upon standard that browser software will support.

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Stephen Calender

September 8, 2016

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.

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Stephen Calender

September 22, 2016

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.

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Stephen Calender

December 14, 2016

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.

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Stephen Calender

January 11, 2017

Preventing Defects And Defensive Programming

As programmers, we can embed fail-safes into our code. In essence, we get decide what failure looks like.

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Stephen Calender

January 23, 2017

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.