engineering Archives | Page 2 of 4

Resource Roundup: How to Get Hired at a Game Studio

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) reports that the US video game industry generated $36 billion in revenue in 2017, a growth of 18% from the prior year. With 2,000+ video game developers and publishers directly employing over 65,000 individuals across all 50 U.S. states (seriously, find out who’s near you using this handy interactive map),…

March 26, 2018 // James LaPierre

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

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

Making Games that Learn

There’s a lot we can learn playing games – from Newtonian physics to object-oriented coding, games can make us more capable and more informed. But here’s a thought that might sound a little ridiculous: what can games learn from us? According to today’s article from Fast Company, Unity Technologies is looking to answer that very question. Yesterday…

September 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

Highlights from a Decade of Learning Games

What does a decade of learning games look like? Filament Games has been around making learning games and taking names since 2005, which was so long ago that smartphones weren’t even a thing at the time. A lot has changed about the world since then, and correspondingly, a lot has changed about how we design…

July 31, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Curious About Coding – Introducing Scratch to Spring Harbor Middle School

When Filament Games first received a request to talk about engineering in video games as a fun activity that could be presented in 50 minutes, we were stumped. It’s easier to talk about designing games by creating your own or think about art styles by creating pixel art projects than it is to teach an entire new…

May 25, 2017 // Sarah Conn

iCivics Suite Updates: How The Art Evolved

Filament Games and iCivics.org have shared a long and prosperous relationship over the years, during which they have created nineteen learning games together. These games have been played in all 50 states by students and educators alike, teaching a wide variety of civics topics from basic American rights and judicial processes to the fundamental structure of…

April 3, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

Introducing unity3d-pixi

In education, technology moves more slowly than in the consumer world. Institutions must eke all of the value out of their existing hardware, and even when they do make new hardware purchases, the hardware is still not requisitioned with games in mind. This means that when we are charged with building software that is accessible…

March 23, 2017 // Alex Stone

Major League Hacking

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of serving as a judge for MadHacks, the Madison, WI chapter of Major League Hacking (MLH). MLH bills itself as the official student hackathon league, and rightly so! This event was serious business. MLH works with thousands of students on an annual basis, holding over 200 weekend-long invention…

March 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

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

#engineering