In January, we spent two weeks in North Dakota talking to teachers and observing teachers and students playing Spirit Lake: The Game and Fish Lake. For weeks, we have been working on the changes they recommended and more suggestions that came in as students played the game. Drum roll, please […]
AnnMaria De Mars
Answers – 50 cents Answers, requiring thought – $100 ———————————————- My favorite joke: The military had purchased a piece of machinery for a cost of $100 million. There was just one problem. It had quit working. After trying everything they could possibly think of without success, they called in a […]
Complicated Is Good
Here at 7 Generation Games, we ignore a lot of advice. Probably the most common piece of advice we ignore is: Everyone is doing iPad games. You should concentrate on tablets. Really? I looked for a Grand Theft Auto iPad version and I couldn’t find one, because, as David Price […]
We’re Not Like Everyone Else
Have you ever thought about how many parts there are in a computer game? You need artwork – every single scene has, well, a scene. You need a background. Then you need characters, people, zombies, whatever. You need a story line. It can be simple – the zombies are going […]
Squirting in the education
Yesterday, I did the Happy Dance in my office when we finished version 2.2 of Spirit Lake. I said that despite taking me away from virtually every other interest in my life, being obsessed with a start-up is worth it. WHY? In thinking it over today, I realized that 7 […]
Make Something, Make a Difference, Make Money
Really useful advice for start-ups on How Not to Die from Paul Graham emphasized The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble…. We’re taking […]
The Pros and Cons of Being Obsessed
Dog food? If you are really observant, you may have noticed that this post is categorized under “dog food”. What the heck is that all about? In software companies, the phrase “eating your own dog food” is often used to refer to people who use the products their companies […]
Cirque du Soleil and Our Games
What is the calorie content of the average rabbit? When I was in graduate school studying multivariate statistics, I never guessed this would be one of the questions I’d ask in a typical work day. As part of our look into what a game developer does all day, I’m going […]
Snaring Rabbits
I’m back! It’s been a while since I was on the blog, between Spirit Lake, Turtle Mountain and Las Vegas. Kind of ironic that I don’t gamble since so much of my time is spent staying in hotels with casinos. After two weeks of meeting with teachers and students in […]
Meanwhile, back at the office … Perseverance
The top scorer in the Fish Lake game for last week was … Tiger5 The first two players to finish our new release of the Spirit Lake game are TTMcGarvey4 TTMcGarvey13 They are moving on to Fish Lake, so the Tiger may have some competition!
And we have a winner !
We drove out to Warwick, North Dakota last week. If you wondered what the scenery was like, it all pretty much looked like this. It was worth it, though, because we met a lot of really smart people. One of them, Dean Dauphinais, is the Superintendent of Warwick Schools and […]
A Virtual Eagle Feather to our High Scorer of the ...
Lately, I’m feeling like Ben & Jerry – or maybe it’s Snapple. At any rate, some northeastern, cold weather states consumable product where they got their company off the ground by going to all of the local stores and talking the individual store owners into trying their product and seeing […]