Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

sausage — We’re almost done adding the polish to Spirit Lake. That’s polish, as in making all shiny and perfect, “polish your car”, not “Polish” as in sausage. The first change you’ll see from earlier versions is that the introductory 2-D hunting scene is replaced by a really short 3-D game. As […]

Spirit Lake Polish

May 27, 2015 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

form for math problem — Note: This is a step-by-step example of how to go about creating a mini-game. In this example, you get an animated pet dog. For every multiplication problem you solve, you and your dog get to do more activities. To see the first post in the series, Game Design, click here. […]

Making a Mini-Game Step 2: Setting it up

May 24, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Invisible barriers - zoomed out view — Whenever I get irritated by a company’s failure to consider it’s customers, I try to take a lesson from it. For example, I can’t stand software that nags you to download an update every freaking day. Seriously, is your product so bad that I really need to stop what I’m […]

Little Things Add Up

May 19, 2015 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

You may have seen recent headlines about how a number of Native American actors and consultants walked off the set of an Adam Sandler movie because the content was degrading and insulting to Native people. And yeah, if you read any of the articles, it was that bad – even for what […]

Whether It’s Corporate or Game-Portrayed Culture: If it’s not right, ...

May 15, 2015 in Cultural content / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

I went into the Community Wellness Forum at United American Indian Involvement in Los Angeles last week uncertain of what to expect. I didn’t know how many people would be attending the session I would lead. I knew many of the event attendees worked in public health, but I didn’t […]

What Happens Is What Is Supposed to Happen: What I ...

May 4, 2015 in 7GenGames / Events / Start-up Diaries / Women in Tech by Maria Burns Ortiz

Two of 7 Generation Games founders – our CEO AnnMaria De Mars and our CMO Maria Burns Ortiz – have have spent the last two days in Dallas at the Online Learning Consortium’s International Symposium on Emerging Technologies. It’s been a great experience as 7 Generation Games was one of […]

7 Generation Games Recognized at Emerging Technologies for Online Learning ...

April 23, 2015 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries / Women in Tech by Maria Burns Ortiz

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from April 29, 2012,“Useless & useful advice for SOME small businesses” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. Being sick with only half of my brain cells functioning, I spent the weekend reading […]

Throwback Thursday: Useless & useful advice for SOME small businesses

April 23, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries / Throwback Thursday / Women in Tech tagged keep the rights / speak your mind / startup advice / Throwback Thursday by AnnMaria De Mars

Two years ago, we embarked on our first Kickstarter campaign to help fund our first game, Spirit Lake. We didn’t have any idea what we were getting ourselves into. The amount of time it would take. The stress of wondering whether we would hit our goal. The elation over hitting […]

Three Lessons We Learned From Our Last Kickstarter

April 8, 2015 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

We’re in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, and we’ve been getting a lot of emails about our project. Many of them are from our awesome backers – which we love to get. But we’re also getting a number of emails – 11 and counting — from what we’re internally […]

Kickstarter and the Emergence of Project Trolls

March 31, 2015 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Fish Lake — We get this question a lot and it is actually not a simple answer. One character we plan on using in Forgotten Trail was intended for Fish Lake but we were told by some administrators in no uncertain terms that physical violence between characters in a game for children was […]

How Do You Create Your Characters?

March 26, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

A Lesson The most useful lesson I learned this year is this – you can’t be excellent in your spare time. I should know. I tried it. Up until this month, along with running 7 Generation Games, I was working as a statistical consultant, chair of a non-profit board and […]

Take the Plunge into Your Business

March 19, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries / Women in Tech by AnnMaria De Mars

our office building — I’d like to answer two questions I have been getting A LOT about the tweet-up we are hosting with two other start-ups Evrybit and sabio.la What’s a tweet-up? Can I come? as well as three questions asked with lesser frequency: 3. Where is it? 4. Is the beer really free? […]

You’re Invited to the Tweet-up on March 27th

March 17, 2015 in 7GenGames / Events / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars