This month’s Boston Post Mortem is STILL next week, Tuesday, May 8th at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham.

Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, Seth Sivak will not be speaking this month. (We plan on having him for a future month!)

Instead, we are featuring a talk by Geoff Pitsch of Harmonix:

An Overview of Network Game Programming

Speaker: Geoff Pitsch (@FatherOctopus on Twitter), Software Engineer, Harmonix

Making networked games is hard, and we frequently overlook why it is hard and the myriad problems one may encounter during development.  This talk presents a big-picture analysis of strategies for engineers and designers to consider when making a game with network functionality.

Our apologies for any inconvenience or discomfort this may cause!

Logistics:

Tuesday, May 8th
7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

MIT’s Business in Gaming Conference (aka “MITBiG“) will be held this Thursday (aka “PAX Eve”) at MIT’s Tang Center (aka “E-51“, a stone’s throw from the MS NERD Center).    The event will run 8:30am to 4pm, ending comfortably before the pre-PAX party rush.

This year’s agenda features a keynote by Take Two’s Strauss Zelnick, and four panels:

• Marketing, Branding, and IP in a Digital Age
• Corporate Finance and M&A in the Gaming Industry
• Project Management: Avoiding Burnout in Creative Staff
• Managing Start-ups

And also breakfast & lunch.  Check out the speaker roster.

Full info at www.MITBiG.com

There are a limited number of free-registration invites available, with preference given to indie developers and students.  Send your request to Jorge Desormeaux <jdesormeaux@gmail.com>

The following is from our friends at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab:

Hello Friends of GAMBIT!

This Friday we are hosting a very special game tournament, playing my new favorite indie hit Hokra! We are very lucky to have Ramiro Corbetta, the game’s designer coming to deliver a talk about the “sportification” of Indie games with our good friend Doug Wilson from Die Gute Fabrik, and designer of J.S. Joust and B.U.T.T.O.N. They will be speaking briefly before the event kicks off, and then we will be playing lots and lots of Hokra. The event is also co-sponsored by the always awesomely indie Kill Screen magazine! The event is going to be live-streamed on Ustream with our very own Todd Harper providing commentary!

Because we are organizing a competition, we are asking for people interested in playing to register a team. The information for registration is available on our GAMBIT blog here. There is also a video that explains Hokra a bit for those of you who have never seen nor heard of it.

“But, I’ve never played Hokra before, I’m going to lose so badly” you might be thinking to yourself. Well DON’T WORRY, the game has actually never been publicly released, so most people have never played. Besides that, we are structuring the tournament for maximum FUN, so even if you do lose, you will have plenty of opportunity to play more Hokra and cheer on others as well.

We are asking people to register as teams of two. If you do not have, or cannot find a partner to play with, please email me, Abe Stein, and I will collect a list of “Free Agents” to be paired up at the event.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. And sign up soon, as slots for competing will be going fast!

thanks,

Abe

The Massachusetts Digital Games Institute is partnering with 3D Stimulus day at the Microsoft NERD Center for the MassDiGI Game Challenge.

Feel the excitement of gaming and take part in a hands-on weekend of education and development! The MassDiGI Game Challenge weekend, April 13-15 at Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, is an opportunity for industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and students to participate in the creation of an actual game and to learn more about the game industry. Whether you are a small developer looking to breakout, a student exploring job opportunities, or a parent on the lookout for industry trends, you’ll be guaranteed to walk away with valuable new connections and a better understanding of this lucrative industry.

Join us to participate in the Challenge, to hear from industry pros in our sessions-day, to demo games from local developers, to look for a job in our job fair and much more!

In addition, on April 14, the Challenge is pleased to be partnering with Great Eastern Technology’s 3D Stimulus Day which is also happening at Microsoft NERD Center.

Register for the event here.

We’d like to invite you to our next Boston Unity Group Meetup! This is super special All-Day Event combining BUG and 3D Stimulus Day! We’re partnering up with the incredible folks at Great Eastern Technology (GET) to provide a day of talks, networking and free food. Afterwards we’ll set out on an excursion to CBC for beers and even more networking.

GET and NEDAG are hosting their 4th Annual 3D Stimulus Day at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA. Not too surprising to us, ALL the sessions involve Unity! Once more, Russ Morris, of Unity Tech and founder of the London Unity Group, will make a special trip across the pond to present UNITY: CREATING A GAME. Other local artists and developers will be presenting on cutting edge topics as well!

Register here!

ART OUT OF THE GAME
Art by Video Game Artists When Not Making Video Games
March 19 – April 11, 2012

RECEPTION/Pre-PAX Party: Wednesday, April 4th, 7-9pm
WHERE: The Gallery on the Plaza, 10 Brookline Place West, Brookline, MA

Sponsored by the New England Institute of Art and Great Eastern Technologies

There are nine featured artists from most of the major video game companies in New England, including Turbine Inc, Harmonix, Demiurge, 38 Studios, and Zynga Boston.

More information about the show is available here:
http://neiasiggraph.org/game/art-out-of-the-game-2012/

The Boston chapter of the Autodesk Animation User’s Group Association (AAUGA) is hosting a pre-PAX East event, with special guests from local game studios, as well as TurboSquid.

Michele Bousquet from TurboSquid will talk about CheckMate, the first universal 3D modeling standard, and how it’s affecting the 3D industry as a whole. She’ll also tell you how you can take advantage of CheckMate to make a substantial side income at TurboSquid. 

Then, Eric Campanella from Tencent will discuss the Game Development Pipeline, describing the importance of understanding all parameters of executing a production task before you start, including design concerns, engine limitations, and art direction.  He will discuss why it’s useful to fully understand the complete process of how your asset is being used.  This includes the department that delivers it to you and the dependencies of that asset after it leaves you.  The more you make that kind of effort, the more effective of a developer you will become!

And the next presentation will cover all the aspects of creating successful character assets for the gaming pipeline.  This will be followed by our last presentation, which will focus on the techniques and methods for creating game engine ready FX and these FX fit into the overall game pipeline. .  This will be brought to us by Franco Galletta, a well-rounded and experienced game pipeline artist, whose multifaceted experiences at such studios as Kaon Interactive, FireHose Games and Seven45 Studios has landed him in a key role as a game FX artist at Turbine.

Thursday – March 15, 2012 6:30-8:30pm Neoscape, Inc. 330 Congress Street, Floor 2, Boston, MA 02210 http://www.aaugaboston.com | https://www.facebook.com/BostonAAUGA

With the twenty-first century comes a new breed of struggling independent artist: the indie game designer. Refusing to toil for major developers, these innovators independently conceive, design, and program their distinctly personal games in the hope that they, too, may find success.

On Thursday, April 19th there will be two showings of the film, one at 7:00pm and another at 9:30pm. More information on the event as we get closer to the date. (There will be some sort of informal meet-up for folks to talk about the film and Indie Game development in general or specific)

More information and registration can be found on eventbrite.

Logistics:

Thursday, April 19th
7:00pm and 9:30 pm @
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Indie Game:The Movie

This month’s Boston Post Mortem is Wednesday, March 21st at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham.

Our Boston Post Mortem for March is a special joint meeting between us and the Boston Audio Engineering Society. Boston AES is the local chapter of the only professional society devoted exclusively to audio technology, and since we partnered with them a few years ago we’ve been looking forward to doing so again. This meeting functions as both their monthly meeting and ours!

As such, our talk this month will be an audio focused one:

Making the game “Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure” was a really wild ride. A skeleton crew, developing a AAA IP without any support from the behemoth EA Tiburon, a sports games studio that green lighted it against incredible odds. The resulting Audio for this game generated incredibly positive feedback from the reviewer and fan community and was an exercise in unorthodox thinking and a bit of a truly unique experience which Gene Rozenberg would like to share nearly three years later.

Speaker bio: Gene M. Rozenberg is a professional composer and audio designer with over 15 years of industry experience. He enjoys all aspects of audio design and music composition for the game industry and is currently employed by 38 Studios, LLC. as a Senior Composer/Audio Designer.

Logistics:
Wednesday, March 21st 7pm @ The Skellig, Waltham
Directions: http://www.bostonpostmortem.org/directions/

Digital Games: Playing in the Valley is a one day conference on Thursday, March 15th from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm. The focus is on discussing digital games, economic development, education and entrepreneurship. After the conference there will be an open house at Hitpoint Studios, 59 North St., Hatfield, MA 01038.

The conference is free to attend and you can register here: http://playinginthevalley.eventbrite.com/

Location: Hampshire College Franklin Patterson Hall 893 West St., Amherst, MA 01002

Date: Thursday, March 15th from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Presented by: Hampshire College, MassDiGi and the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council