Stephen Calender Archives | Filament Games

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

A Tale of Two Data Sets – Data in Game Development

It might surprise you to learn that working on the data of your game is usually about half the development effort – if not more. Whether your data is bits of dialogue, images, items, or locations of objects, all of that information has to be meticulously designed and organized. While the game might have some…

July 10, 2019 // Stephen Calender

How to Get Hired at a Game Studio: Game Engineer Edition

One of my responsibilities at Filament is facilitating the hiring process, and I will often be the first person to screen applications. Upon first review, I try to give each applicant 10 minutes of my time. Based on Filament’s structure, I need to evaluate a candidate on the following criteria: Are they capable of building…

October 16, 2017 // Stephen Calender

Learning About Learning: Dog Training

If you have been following Filament Games you have probably met my dog Euler (named after Leonhard Euler). As you might infer, Filament has an office policy where pets are welcome at work. Euler has appeared across Filament’s media. For example, she has been featured, and photo-bombed others on our instagram. I added a second dog,…

October 11, 2017 // Stephen Calender

10 Tips for Designing a Game Tutorial

Every game teaches you how to play. Plants vs. Zombies is an interesting case study because it made “hardcore” strategy content accessible to casual and non-gamers. Before Plants vs. Zombies the game industry had falsely concluded that the casual market just wasn’t interested in certain game genres. In addition to appealing to casual gamers, it…

March 16, 2017 // Stephen Calender

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

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

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

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? After several years in the games industry, my answer is creating learning games. Though it may not seem obvious at…

September 18, 2015 // Stephen Calender