Starting with the happy news. Our 7 Gen Blocks platform has made it possible for us to create games at a far faster pace and lower cost. Check out six educational games we made in the past year thanks to a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. All of these were made with 7 Gen Blocks. And those aren’t all of the games we’ve made this year. We also make “white label” games where we create a game for an organization and they host it on their own site or distribute it themselves. If you’d like us to make a game for you, you can find more information here, – https://www.7generationgames.com/customized-development/ or just email me
This is from our next game, Powwow Stands, that will be done by Dec.
Low-Code Demo , No-Code and PD
I’ll have a new build of the free, low-code demo version of blocks up before Christmas. If you signed up to receive the blocks, you’ll get a link when it’s available. We are still on track to have our no-code version available by April, 2026. You can get on the list for a free low-code or no-code demo version and get invited to online training by signing up here. –
Completely Random –
AnnMaria Did a TED Talk on What we talk about at the secret world champion meetings.
Replacing Worksheets, not World of Warcraft
When I tell people that our 7 Gen Blocks make it possible to easily and affordably create educational games, sometimes that are thinking we are building the next Fortnite or Minecraft. We are not. We are reinventing the worksheet. If your students are filling out workbooks or worksheets of math problems, reading paragraphs of text and answering questions – we’ve turned that into short, engaging, educational games. Games focus on one or two standards, like converting fractions to decimals.
Unity Bugs and Housecleaning
Maybe you’ve heard about the security bug in Unity. If not, the 30-second version is that Unity is the game development engine used in 70% of mobile games, including ours and it was found to have a security breach that affected any games built over a period of EIGHT YEARS. So, along with every other game developer, we had to put new versions up on Google Play.
Never fear, your data are safe because Akiptan (Growing Your Garden), Making Camp Ojibwe, Making Camp Lakota, Making Camp Bilingual, Making Camp Lakota, Making Camp Premium and Aztech: Empiric Empire have all been updated on the Play Store. This bug did not affect iOS, Steam already had a fix in place, and our web-based games don’t use Unity, so we are all okay there. You can check out almost all of our games here. Why almost all? Because we have been so busy making new games, I haven’t had time to update our game catalog everywhere.
Why am I not more upset about this?
You’d think having to rebuild all of the games in the Play Store would make me a little, um, annoyed. Well, it did, a little. We have been focusing heavily on the game builder. However, reviewing and revising our games has been on my to-do list for a while. If our marketing plan is going to be “Hey, look at how easy it can be to make educational games!” then the games we have made should be as effective and bug-free as we can make them.
“Why do you have to keep updating your games?”
One of our investors asked me this, and it’s a fair question. There are four reasons. The most common is that some language or code library we use in the games – jQuery, bootstrap, PHP – changes and that breaks our existing code. Let’s say that we had used Number.toInteger to round answers to the nearest integer and now that function is no longer supported and has been replaced by Math.trunc or parseInt, we’d need to go back through and change the code everywhere that was used. (Don’t write and tell me why toInteger was a bad idea. This is just an example.) Second, and more often than one would expect, something happens like a less dramatic version of this Unity event – a new update introduces a bug or a bug is found in existing software. Third, new devices come out that we want to support. Google Play recently required games to support a 16kb memory page to support newer phones. Devices that are smaller or larger than the existing market are released and now the next arrow is off the screen because we didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to make a 100pixel by 100pixel phone (okay, that’s an exaggeration but it wouldnt surprise me). No, you cannot play our games on your Apple watch. Just stop it!
Finally, there are bugs that we didn’t catch because we cannot test every possible scenario, like a student replaying the game 30 times and now their score is over 1,000. And then, there are the bugs that slipped through the cracks. “You didn’t fix it?” “I thought you fixed it.” Yes, we use bugzilla and people are assigned bugs but they get distracted, leave for a new job, get abducted by aliens – well, maybe not the last part.
The Good News and Better News
Along with doing the new builds to fix the security issue and meet new requirements, we brought back our Community Manager, Christy Hanson (hi, Christy!) to oversee quality assurance. We’ve found and fixed several other bugs in the process. Between now and Christmas, we’ll be doing more updates to clean up some cosmetic issues and some bugs that only show up in edge cases.
So, there you have it, something old (the games from 2015 through now), something new (our game builder) and just to round it out, something blue from our workcation in Belize.
