howto Archives | Page 5 of 8

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

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

How to Make a Simple Project Shine

We make games! You already knew that because you’re reading our blog, but what you may not know is that we’ve partnered with a variety of organizations to design elegant platforms to house their games, apps, and other digital content. These projects have brought to light a number of design concepts that we wanted to…

March 8, 2017 // Madeline Folz

Designing for the Spectrum of VR Devices

VR! The kids are INTO IT! We’ve been so focused on VR over here at Filament Games I can’t be 100% certain I’m not typing this with goggles on right now. It’s been really exciting to cut our teeth on our first round of VR projects, and it’s led to a lot of interesting rumination…

January 30, 2017 // Dan Norton

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

The 4 P’s of Designing Learning Games with Impact

iCivics is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinvigorating civic learning through interactive and engaging learning resources. Their platform has more than 7 million registered students and 100,000 registered teachers in all 50 United States. The article below is written by iCivics Director of Content Carrie Ray-Hill and shares valuable insights into creating mission-driven game-based learning tools.…

January 26, 2017 // Carrie Ray-Hill

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

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

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

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