Games and Grog, once a month

Hi everyone,

This month the Boston Post Mortem is happy to welcome Drs. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, authors of Grand Theft Childhood, a book released earlier this year that talks about the sometimes counterintuitive ways that video games both help and harm children. Kutner and Olson are based out of Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hopital, so we are extremely excited that they’ve agreed to present some of their findings to the local dev community!

Logistics:

Wednesday, July 9 @ 7pm
The Skellig, Waltham
Directions here, as usual.

(Note that there’s no sponsorship this month, please pay for your own drinks and food!)

See you all there!

Matthew Myers, owner of 2EastMusic has just announced that his original music video “Yuri The Only One” will be part of Video Games Live, the first and most successful video game concert tour in the world. The piece will be integrated at all VGL concerts, and Myers will perform live with the orchestra at select tour dates.

Matthew Myers is an emerging music composer and sound designer with work featured in numerous PC, online and mobile titles. LeetStreet Boys is a band created by Myers, which performs satirical pop songs about gaming culture themes. The music video for “Yuri The Only One” is available online here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=189QSTKC5no

You might have seen his video at a recent Post Mortem meeting.

This just in: due to some travel cancellations, GET and Autodesk are no longer running their 4pm-7pm event on Wednesday.

Do not go to The Skellig at 4PM. Do, however, go at 7PM!

The regular Post Mortem meeting from 7pm-10pm will still be happening, and the lovely folks at Great Eastern Technology have been kind enough to swap in their buffet for that time slot. This means that there will be both free food and drink tickets at the regular Post Mortem event! GET will also be around during the meeting with a small demo table. In particular they’ll have some sweet Cintiq tablet/monitors that they’re showing off.

The original post for this event has been updated to reflect these changes.

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be next week, on Wednesday, June 11, 7pm to 10pm at the Skellig in Waltham. Our speaker will be Ravi Mehta, Vice President of Publishing at Viximo, also formerly of Microsoft Game Studios. He’ll be giving a talk on the virtual goods market, which encompasses those little $1 gifts in Facebook as well as all the arms and armor people are buying and selling in MMOGs. Great Eastern Technology and Autodesk are our food and drink sponsors this month, so thanks to them you’ll be getting drink tickets and a free buffet as well!

Directions to the Skellig are available here.

Note: there was previously an event from 4pm-7pm, also at the Skellig. This is no longer the case, so don’t show up at 4pm!

It’s time for the Boston Post Mortem again, and this time around we’re having our very first Wii game Post Mortem!

This month Kurt Reiner of Demiurge Studios will talk about developing “Brothers in Arms: Double Time” for the Wii in conjunction with Gearbox Software.  This project began with porting the Unreal Engine 2 engine from the Xbox to the Wii.  It then required migrating/redesigning game content as well as designing the movement and combat controls to utilize the Wii remote.   The talk will touch on the team needs for Wii development and the lessons learned from this project.

Kurt Reiner serves as Technical Director at Demiurge Studios but sometimes manages to sneak into engineering lead and programmer roles when others aren’t looking.  Kurt has been in the game industry since 1998, when he helped found Shaba Games. After Shaba, Kurt moved on to Electronic Arts. There he worked on several critical intellectual properties including Tiger Woods Golf, James Bond, and the Sims. Kurt holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Logistics:

Wednesday, May 14 @ 7pm
The Skellig, Waltham
You can find all the other logistical information on our “About” page.

Turbine just announced that they’ve received $40 million in funding. Congrats!

The New England Institute of Art
Senior Portfolio Show
April 16th, 1 - 5 PM
The Brookline Holiday Inn, 1200 Beacon Street, Coolidge Corner

Come see the creative 2D and 3D work of our talented Animation seniors! Many are available for freelance or full-time work opportunities. Pre-screen future resources, or just come see some inventive demo reels.

RSVP to: Kristin Casasanto, Senior Career Advisor, Media Arts & Animation at NEiA: kcasasanto -at- aii.edu
Contact Kristin for directions or questions.

There’s a post mortem of AudiOdyssey up on GameCareerGuide. For those of you who weren’t at our December meeting, AudiOdyssey is a Wiimote-controlled accessible rhythm game made by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT lab last Summer.

I was surprised (to put it mildly) to see an article in Entertainment Weekly written by Stephen King, decrying the HR 1423 bill that Kent Quirk (along with the ESA and IEMA) testified against. King’s article mostly takes a common sense, “shouldn’t the parents be protecting their kids?” standpoint. You can read the full article here.

In case you haven’t heard, Rockstar Games recently acquired Mad Doc Software. You can read the official press release here. Congratulations to the hard-working devs at Mad Do–no, wait: the hard-working devs at Rockstar New England!