May Meetup - Featuring Adam Gabbert of Manitou Games

For our May event, we'll feature a talk by Adam Gabbert, a multi-talented developer and co-founder of Manitou Games. He'll discuss the technology and lessons learned behind his studio's recent iOS game Turtle Up.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/d/5/2/b/600_437454571.jpeg

Prior to founding Manitou, Adam already had considerable experience in game dev and animation. From 1999 to 2006, he served as Senior Software Engineer at National Instruments in Austin. When his girlfriend decided to pursue a master's degree in Berkeley, he followed her and landed a job writing animation and lighting software at Pixar (http://www.pixar.com/). While there, he worked on the iconic films Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3.

After his girlfriend finished her degree, they moved back to Austin and got married. Adam joined Junction Point Studios (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junction_Point_Studios) and served as Senior Programmer on the critically acclaimed title Epic Mickey. At Junction Point, Adam also met Matt Baer (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-baer/0/932/302), a programmer with experience at Looking Glass Studios (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_Studios) and Ion Storm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Storm). Eventually, they decided to take fate into their own hands and write an iOS game together. Adam returned to National Instruments and brought Matt along with him. This allowed them to moonlight on Turtle Up, which was released in February.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoKkQ2IvHo8

Turtle Up challenges players to guide a mystical sea turtle through 50 adventure-filled levels. The primary mechanic revolves around painting currents into an ever-changing canvas of water. To create the game's unique fluid simulations, Adam and Matt built their own game engine from scratch. The entire game shows a level of polish that belies their AAA experience, while also clearly being designed and optimized for mobile, touch-enabled devices.

In his talk, Adam will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of developing the game as a side-project, the technical challenges of writing a game entirely from scratch, the design implications of building a game around fluid simulation, and lessons learned (including press, metrics, monetization, testing, etc). Don't miss what promises to be an informative and valuable discussion!

Schedule for this event:
• 6:30pm - Arrival and socializing
• 7:00pm - Intro and announcements
• 7:10pm - Adam Gabbert talk
• 8:00pm - Q&A
• 8:30pm - More socializing

Supported by Pearson:

Thanks to generous support from Pearson (http://www.pearsonassessments.com/), this event will include free beer and pizza! Pearson is currently seeking innovative, highly motivated, and passionate mobile engineers to help build a new set of tablet-based assessment tools called Q-Interactive (http://www.helloq.com/).

As a Senior Mobile Engineer at Pearson, you will contribute heavily to the ideation, design, and development of the Q-Interactive platform. These tools are used by school and clinical psychologists to help them make accurate diagnoses and plan appropriate interventions for their patients and students. For more info, please visit Pearson's job listing (http://pearson.jobs/austin-tx/senior-mobile-engineer-javascript/566BE9D365DB45FDACA85BAFCECC0E37/job/).

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