Years ago, a client who had called me four times in three days to give me a contract, ended her last call with, “You must be independently wealthy that you don’t want this money I’m trying to give you.” Actually, I was on an American Indian reservation that, at the […]
AnnMaria De Mars
A post on “toxic lies about start-up culture” by Shanley Kane really got me to thinking about our company. One of the lies she challenges is that meetings are evil, so you should have as few of them as possible. Our staff spans seven cities in three states, so getting together […]
Meetings are not evil
The problem with many educational games is that they are designed in someone’s office without regular interaction with actual teachers and students. I was teaching third grade at Four Winds in 1988 when they built their first computer lab. The students’ first visit to the lab was to take a […]
Real Teachers: The 7 Generation Games Difference
First of all, if you are playing Spirit Lake:The Game and looked here because you are having a problem, let me just start with this, from our readme file we finally got around to writing. STOP AND READ THIS 90% of the problems users have can be prevented by doing […]
Life of a million fixes
We’ll be sending all of our pre-release purchasers a link to a new update this week, just because we want you to have it. What this update includes: Self-install for Windows (no more extracting files, creating your own shortcut). Plus a nice little buffalo icon on your desktop. More sound […]
New Update this Week
You know, I think we need to find a more user-friendly way to install the game on windows than download this, extract all these files and move this here. When Dennis said this out loud, my initial reaction, was, No shit, Captain Obvious! You might wonder why we were so […]
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Whenever I read articles about the need for more diversity in tech start-ups it is with mixed feelings. While I completely agree with the sentiment that we need more than “Zuckerberg clones selling to yuppies”, the typical comment like in this Fast Company article that companies targeting a diverse market […]
We are not a unicorn!
“Game design is 10% inspiration and 90% staring at math trying to figure out why things don’t work.” Thank you Stephen Mangold @steve85uk on twitter for that almost completely true quote. Actually, it’s more like 10% inspiration, 30% staring at code and 60% a bunch of stuff I hadn’t really […]
The Unexpected Pieces (& People) in Game Design
I just finished Level 0 of the upcoming Fish Lake game. Level 0 in each game has two purposes: Be a fun way to learn how to play the game. Players walk around in a 2-D version of the “real” virtual world. They shoot things, jump, move around, learn to […]
Why did you shoot the grandfather?
Whether it comes to learning math, reading, programming or sports, we don’t believe just in quality time. We like great big, heaps of quantity time. Our games are like comic books. They are fun to play, they aren’t big budget, they have a story and characters, and they come out […]
Why We’re Selling Our Games Like a Comic Book
I completely disagree that anyone can build an educational game, or even any game programmer or educator. You need to understand the area of education you are trying to teach, in our case, math. You also need to understand what makes kids play a game, what kids need to learn, […]
The element of surprise o—-
PART A Were you one of our backers on Kickstarter? Do you work in education? Do you home-school your children? PART B Will you be in Las Vegas on July 5th? If you answered yes to any of the questions in Part A and to Part B then you are […]