This month’s Boston Post Mortem is Wednesday, February 15th at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham.

We’re featuring a panel of experienced community managers for games. The panelists will be discussing the different purposes of community management and why it is critical to game development.

• Aaron Trites, Manager of Community Development, Harmonix Music Systems
• Rick Heaton, Community Manager, The Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine, Inc
•  Eric Chon, Producer and Community Manager, Gamesville.com
• Daniel Salsberg, Double Tap Games, moderator

Also, this month’s meeting is generously sponsored by Tencent Boston, who are providing free drink tickets!

Tencent Boston is a premier game development studio led by industry veterans that are driving the creation of world class online games for a global audience. Founded as a subsidiary of Tencent, Inc. – the foremost provider of Internet and wireless value-added services in China – the Boston area studio combines this worldwide market strength, with experience and innovation, to create awesome and entertaining new online gaming offerings.

Tencent Boston is looking for talent to join our growing team of developers with openings in the art, programming and design departments. We are also seeking gamers to participate in upcoming playtests and focus groups. For more information visit us at: http://www.tencentboston.com.

Logistics:

Wednesday, February 15th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

Hope to see you all next week!

As a result of the holiday season catching us by surprise, this month’s Boston Post Mortem meeting will be held a week later than usual, on Wednesday, January 18 at The Skellig in Waltham.

This month’s presentation is a talk about resumes and hiring, featuring Emily Gabrian (Harmonix), Hannah Foell (Turbine), and Kevin Fanning (Cogo Labs; author of Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs). This will have great advice not just for the first-time job seeker, but for those of us who have been in the industry for quite a while — like it or not, we all have to look for jobs at some point or another!

Logistics:
Wednesday, January 18th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions

(Update: due to a conflict we had to change our speaker and talk. Sorry for the inconvenience.)

This month’s meeting will take place on Tuesday, December 13 at The Skellig in Waltham. Details on this month’s talk:

Talk Title: Fieldrunners HTML5: Bringing a Hit iOS Game to the Web

Speaker: Darius Kazemi

Just this past summer, Bocoup and Gradient Studios worked with Subatomic Studios to port their smash-hit iOS tower defense game Fieldrunners to HTML5. This post mortem will cover porting OpenGL ES to WebGL, using the Web Audio API for game audio, integrating microtransactions and DLC, and a detailed look at graphics performance.

Logistics:

Tuesday, December 13th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will held on on Tuesday, Oct 11th, at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham (directions).

Our guest speaker this month is Tammo “kb” Hinrichs, founding member of the demogroup Farbrausch. He’ll be talking about the demoscene:

The demoscene is a computer art subculture presently more active in Europe, that has historically centered around demos, or noninteractive demonstrations of coding, artistic, and musical prowess, which run realtime on computers.

It has encouraged students as well as mid-career IT and computer creative professionals to build and continue to develop their skills, and facilitated networking and mentorship connections. Software development houses, particularly game studios, have benefited from techniques refined in the scene, such as procedural content generation, and many demosceners work in the games industry.

Tammo “kb” Hinrichs is a coder at 49Games GmbH and founding member of the demogroup Farbrausch. He will give an overview of the past and present of the scene, show a few demos, discuss demosceners’ work in the games industry, and describe some of the techniques used to render high-quality realtime imagery and sound, particularly in 4 kilobyte demos.

This talk is sponsored by @party, a Boston area demoparty. Please visit their website at atparty-demoscene.net.

Logistics:
Tuesday, October 11th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be next week, on Tuesday, September 13th, at The Skellig in Waltham.

Our guest speakers this month will be the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab doing a round up of their summer projects!

The students developed six games this past summer, each tackling a different research problem, and arriving at some unexpected insights along the way. This year’s projects include an LGBTQ-themed JRPG (acronyms!), a procedurally generated adventure puzzle game, a production experiment that “inverted the traditional relationship between Design and QA,” and more!

You can check out their games here.

Logistics:
Tuesday, September 13th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be next week, on Tuesday, August 9th at The Skellig in Waltham.

Our guest speaker this month will be Jon Radoff, who will be giving a talk based on his recent book ‘Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Games’ :

Jon Radoff will present ideas drawn from his recent book, ‘Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Games’, to discuss how games have been part of how humans have lived, worked and played for over 5,000 years. Jon will focus on gameplay motivations, using research on social games and MMOs, his own experiences with gameplay analytics, as well as recent discoveries in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to present a unified way to uncover and design the features that people think are fun.  If you thought games were just Skinner boxes, then you’ll walk away with an appreciation of how much more sophisticated games really are–and if you already knew this was false, you’ll be armed with new tools to communicate your Next Big Idea!

Logistics:
Tuesday, August 9th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be this Wednesday, July 13th at The Skellig in Waltham. Our guest speaker this month will be Scott Macmillan, who will be giving a post mortem of his company, Macguffin Games, in ‘Death of an Indie Studio’:

Last December, Boston area indie studio Macguffin Games closed its doors. In three years, Scott Macmillan took the studio from a one-man shop to a 4-person startup with paid employees, launched two games (one of them for Facebook), and then finally shut the whole thing down with no regrets. At this talk, he’ll discuss the big lessons he learned, what worked and what didn’t, and take lots of questions from the audience.

Logistics:
Wednesday, July 13th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be a week later than usual, on Tuesday, June 21th at The Skellig in Waltham. The presentation this month will be a post mortem of Slam Bolt Scrappers, the puzzle brawler from local developer Fire Hose Games.  

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a puzzle video game produced by independent developer Fire Hose Games. Players control characters who fight enemies in a beat’em up style and build towers to destroy other players. The game blends aspects of several video game genres including puzzle, action, and strategy. It can be found for download on Sony’s PSN service.

Logistics:
Tuesday, June 21th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

 This month’s Boston Post Mortem will be two weeks later than usual, on Wednesday May 25th at The Skellig in Waltham. Apologies for the scheduling, but it was the only time that worked for both the venue and for this month’s speakers.

Our guest speakers this month are Dean Tate and Matt Boch from Harmonix, who will be giving a post mortem of Dance Central:

Join two Harmonix designers as they recount the story of how Dance Central came to be. With the introduction of Kinect, Harmonix saw the opportunity to create a game it had long dreamt about, one that could make learning to dance as fun as dancing itself. Despite a dependency on evolving technology, in just over a year’s development time the team managed to create a game that not only realized this dream but also became a genre defining experience for full-body motion gaming. In order to accomplish this feat, the team employed novel practices to shape and refine the goal, rule out interesting but problematic concepts, and ultimately drive towards the core mechanics of what is now Dance Central.

Logistics:
Wednesday, May 25th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/