In a time where the big three US educational publishers are competing to bring the best edutech packages to school districts and consumers, a new player has been quietly reinventing K-12 education.

Amplify are a US-focussed Educational publisher reimagining the way teachers teach and students learn. At the heart of this ambition is a groundbreaking digital curriculum for K-12, focusing on math, ELA and science. 

Over the past year or so, we’ve been working with Amplify Learning to produce a series of games to be sold along this core curricula for a variety of platforms including Android and iOS.

Following Amplify's G4C session, we thought we would share more details about our wider involvement and the awesome games we’re making for them!

A new frontier

Our brief was to design educational games linked to core-standards curriculum, but that would be played voluntarily by the kids. Each game ...

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We design games that do much more than just entertain people. They are designed to communicate, inspire, change behaviour and educate, and we refer to them as ‘Games with Purpose’. 

This helpful catch-all phrase includes a bunch of sub-genres we are hugely passionate about, namely educational games, social impact games, health games, and serious games - and about 6 months ago we set out to find the best examples out there.

The results were a little surprising. 

The best of the best

The values used to deem ‘best’ are the same that guide our own output; high fun, strong delivery of objectives and high production values. However, finding great examples that satisfied this rubric proved hugely challenging. 

Much of what we found was either lacking game integrity, wasn't delivering against its objectives or was just badly made. Reassuringly there were also some brilliant examples out there, but they lacked discoverability ...

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Following Disney Fairies: Lost & Found's Christmas release, we thought we’d share how we went about developing it in Unity.

Creating a fun game for young teenaged girls can be serious business. It's hard not to fall into the usual tropes especially when working with a big brand, to a specific set of criteria. The hidden-object genre seemed really applicable to the brief. It was challenging but not stressful, could be played cooperatively with friends and family and they makes use of rich environment artwork. For us, it was also a known technical challenge which felt very important given the short 3 month development timeline. 

Disney liked the idea, and so we began our education in the Hidden Object genre. 

The feature set

The feature set borrows from many of our favourites in the genre, whilst being careful to retain the uniqueness of the proposition. The final features ...

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Following up on our recent LUUG talk, we wanted to commit SuperSight’s art approach to our blog. Check out the trailer below to see the game in action.

How do we take a concept from pencil sketch to animated 3D model? The ambition and scope of concept art can sometimes get lost in the production of final assets, so this post focuses on how we kept the art of SuperSight as close to the original vision as possible.

Putting pen to paper

We tend to create concept art no holds barred, the idea is to formulate an ambitious vision that we then try to realise as closely as possible with the final art assets. The initial concept art will often set and inform colour palettes, character silhouettes and most importantly begin to give a game it’s own voice. 

This initial image shows a direction where we were leaning ...

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We’ve talked a lot about making games that are about something but with Axon, our recent game for the Wellcome Collection, we hope to have gone some way to making a game that’s not only about science, but for science too!

Before we explain in detail here’s a little bit of background about the game and its results. The game went live on Wellcome servers on Thursday the 19th March. It rolled on Kongregate, MiniClip and Newgrounds on 22nd March, followed by ArmourGames on 26th March. 

The game hit 3 major peaks:

1. On Saturday 24th March it gained traction (predominantly on Kongregate) with 159,793 games plays. 
2. On Tuesday 27th March the game appeared on ArmorGames pushing total plays to 248,998.
3. On Thursday 29th March Axon was given badges on Kongregate, resulting in homepage promotion and a total of 361,880 plays. 

To date, Friday 18th ...

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