Speakers

Yu Suzuki

YS NET, CEO

Yu Suzuki, one of true games industry veterans and legends, began his incredible more then three decades long games industry career working at Sega at the end of 1983, He is widely know as a creator of a variety of tentpole franchises like Outrun, Afterburner, Virtual Fighter and Shen Mue. He currently resides as the CEO of YS NET. Currently him and his team are working on finishing Shenmue III which is to release later this year.

Hermen Hulst

Guerilla Games, Managing Director / Co-Founder

As Managing Director, Hermen is responsible for the company’s direction and ultimately for Guerrilla’s games from a creative and commercial perspective, including award winning games like Killzone series and Horizon: Zero Dawn. He gained his first experience in the games industry during his student years at Ubisoft in the USA, and started his professional career at Philips Electronics in Strategic Marketing. He subsequently worked as a management consultant at Andersen Consulting before returning to the games industry. Hermen has been the Managing Director of Guerrilla since 2001, and the Vice President for Sony Computer Entertainment’s World Wide Studios in Europe since 2011.

Amy Hennig

Indiependent, Writer/Director

In a career spanning 30 years, Amy Hennig has worked as an artist, animator, game designer, and most notably in the last two decades, as a writer and director. Most recently, Amy worked as the creative director and lead writer on Visceral Games’ Star Wars title, at Electronic Arts. This was following a decade at Naughty Dog as the creative director and writer of Sony Computer Entertainment’s acclaimed Uncharted game series. Prior to joining Naughty Dog, she served as the writer and director of the groundbreaking Soul Reaver / Legacy of Kain series over eight years at Crystal Dynamics.

Hidetaka Miyazaki

From Software, Director / CEO

Hidetaka Miyazaki joined From Software in 2004. He’s directed a wide variety of games including Armored Core 4, Armored Core: For Answer, Demon’s Souls, DARK SOULS, Bloodborne, DARK SOULS III, Déraciné, and Sekiro: Shadow’s Die Twice. In May, 2014 he was named as CEO of From Software. He recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Joystick Awards and is working on finishing his latest title Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Warren Spector

OtherSide Entertainment, Studio Director

Best known for his work on the Deus Ex and Disney Epic Mickey games, he also worked on several entries in the Ultima series early in his career. He began in 1983 in tabletop games, with Steve Jackson Games and TSR, moving into digital games in 1989 where he worked at Origin, Electronic Arts, Looking Glass, Ion Storm and Eidos before starting Junction Point Studios, acquired in 2007 by the Walt Disney Company. From 2013 until 2016 he was the Director of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he is Austin studio director for OtherSide Entertainment working on System Shock 3.

Fumito Ueda

genDESIGN, Game Designer / Founder

Fumito Ueda is a Japanese game director and creator of award winning PlayStation titles ICO, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian. After working at warp and Sony Computer Entertainment he has founded genDESIGN in 2014. Him and his team have worked together with Sony Computer Entertainment in finishing The Last Guardian, and currently he is working on his first independent project at genDESIGN.

Leigh Alexander

Narrative Designer

Leigh Alexander writes futurist fiction and is a narrative designer with a deep passion for the craft of storytelling systems. She was narrative director on the acclaimed game Reigns: Her Majesty, and recently worked on Reigns: Game of Thrones, among others. Previously she worked as a journalist and critic, and her digital culture writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Columbia Journalism Review, Motherboard, the New Statesman and more. She is the author of Breathing Machine, a memoir of early internet society, and her occasional ASMR video series “Lo-Fi Lets Play” explores ancient computer adventure games.

George Krstic

Blizzard Entertainment, Director of Story

As Director of Story for Blizzard Entertainment’s Story and Franchise Development division, Emmy, Annie and Saturn Award nominated creator George Krstic helps shepherd the narrative expressions of all of Blizzard’s game IPs including Warcraft and Overwatch. A veteran of both the game and entertainment industries, George has worked on such diverse projects as “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” “League of Legends,” and “Transformers” as well as creating his own television series for Cartoon Network – “Megas XLR”. George is a lead member of the story group responsible for Blizzard’s animated shorts, in-game cinematics, comic books, novels and audio dramas.

Celia Hodent

Independent UX Consultant

Celia Hodent is recognized as a leader in the application of user experience (UX) and cognitive science in the game industry. Celia holds a PhD in psychology and has over ten years of experience in the development of UX strategy and processes in video game studios. Through her work at Ubisoft (e.g. Rainbow 6 franchise), LucasArts (e.g. Star Wars: 1313), and as Director of UX at Epic Games (e.g. Fortnite), she has contributed to many projects across multiple platforms, from PC to consoles, mobile, and VR. Celia is also the founder of the Game UX Summit, advisor for the GDC UX Summit, and author of The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design.

Youichiro Miyake

SQUARE ENIX, Lead AI Researcher

Youichiro Miyake has been in development of video game titles while researching game AI technologies as the lead AI researcher at SQUARE ENIX. He developed the technical design of AI for the following game titles: CHROME HOUNDS, Demon’s Souls, Armored Core V developed by FROM SOFTWARE, and Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy XV, and Kingdom Hearts 2.8 developed by SQUARE ENIX. He is the chair of the SIG-AI in IGDA Japan, and also the board member of DiGRA Japan and the Society of Art and Science. He is the author of the books “Game AI methods for Digital Games” “Western Philosophy for Artificial Intelligence” (2016) “Eastern Philosophy for Artificial Intelligence” and “The theory of Game AI”(2018).

Hilmar Veigar Petursson

CCP Games, CEO

Hilmar has been leading CCP Games’ ongoing success and growth since his appointment as Chief Executive Officer in 2004. Under Hilmar’s management CCP’s critically acclaimed science-fiction game EVE Online pioneered concepts like player-driven digital economies, democratically elected community governments, and free-to-play mechanics long before they became commonplace in the industry. EVE Online, launched in 2003, celebrated an unprecedented ten consecutive years of subscriber growth and continues to see growth in engagement as it nears its 15th anniversary.

Luis Villegas

Bungie Studios, Director of Services and Infrastructure

Born in Medellin, Colombia, he moved to the United States at the age of 16 with dreams of becoming either a professional basketball player or a game developer. Basketball was not as fun as playing games so he decided to pursue a degree in Computer Science from Florida International University and joined Bungie Studios in 2003. Luis spends his free time practicing Jiu Jitsu, and when he is not at Bungie working on Destiny, he is at the Jiu Jitsu school choking people out. Luis is the Director of Services and Infrastructure at Bungie, leading the team that ensures that every Destiny player has the best possible experience, and works with other leads at Bungie to keep improving the craft of Leadership.

Patrice Désilets

Panache Digital, Co-Founder / Creative Director

Patrice is at the head of Panache Digital games, an independent Montreal-based studio he co-founded in 2014. With close to 22 years of game design under the belt, he his mostly known for his work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and as the creative director behind the global success franchise Assassin’s Creed from his years at Ubisoft Montreal. His first independent title Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey on the evolution of humankind is now starting to make noise as it will be released in 2019.

Christina Seelye

Maximum Games, CEO

An industry veteran of nearly 20 years, Christina Seelye heads Maximum Games, a video game publishing company she co-founded in 2009, and its premier indie label, Modus Games. In fewer than five years, Christina built Maximum Games into a Top 15 global publisher. In 2016, she led the acquisition of Avanquest UK, establishing a prominent presence overseas. In 2017, Maximum Games created its premier indie branch, Modus, to give innovative independent games a platform, such as newly released Ninjin: Clash of Carrots and the upcoming mech brawler, Override: Mech City Brawl.

Tero Virtala

Remedy Entertainment, CEO

Tero Virtala is the CEO of Remedy Entertainment. Previously he spent 12 years building and running the Finnish video games development studio Redlynx. During his tenure, the studio created the global hit franchise Trials. Ubisoft bought Redlynx in 2011. After spending a few years as a consultant to some of the world’s leading video game studios, Tero joined Remedy in 2016 as the CEO. Remedy Entertainment employs over 170 developers and is working on two projects: Crossfire 2 / HD and Control.

Kiki Wolfkill

343 Industries, Studio Head – Halo Transmedia

Kiki heads up 343 Industries’ transmedia and entertainment efforts. She served as Executive Producer on the digital series Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halo: Nightfall, as well as for the recently announced Halo television series being developed with Showtime. Kiki joined 343 Industries in 2009 as Executive Producer and was responsible for building the internal Halo 4 game team and shipping Halo 4. An industry veteran of nearly 20 years, Kiki’s career in games began in the visual arts, where she eventually became Director of Art of Microsoft Studios. Her past credits include the Project Gotham Racing and Forza Motorsport franchises, as well as classics like Fable, Crackdown, Gears of War, and Mass Effect.

Graham Wihlidal

SEED, Senior Rendering Engineer

Graham is a senior rendering engineer at SEED, a cross-disciplinary team working on cutting-edge future technologies and creative experiences at Electronic Arts. Before SEED, Graham was on the Frostbite rendering team, implementing and supporting technology used in many hit games like Battlefield, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Plants vs. Zombies, FIFA, Star Wars: Battlefront, and others. Prior to Frostbite, Graham was a senior engineer at BioWare for many years, shipping numerous titles including the Mass Effect and Dragon Age trilogies, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Graham is also a published author and has presented at several conferences.

Chris Wren

Electronic Arts / XDS, Sr. Manager / Chair of XDS Advisory Committee

Chris is a 16-year veteran of Electronic Arts, beginning his tenure as a Development Director for Sports and Action titles. Chris is a member of EA’s XDI team, supporting the external development needs of the organization. Chris acts as Chair for the XDS Advisory Committee, which ensures excellence in the delivery of the internationally acclaimed XDS event. Chris has held a board positions with ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver, and Vancouver Film School. Chris has delivered sessions at games industry events in the UK, United Arab Emirates, Brazil and Colombia.

Don Daglow

AIAS Foundation, President

Don Daglow is a three-time Inc. 500™ CEO, a pioneering game designer and 2008 Technical Emmy® Award recipient whose career spans the history of the games industry. Teams have shipped over $1 billion in products under his leadership. He is the only games executive who has held leadership positions on every generation of video game consoles, from 1980 to the present. In 2003 he received the CGE Award for “groundbreaking achievements that shaped the Video Game Industry,” and in 2018 he was inducted into the Wall of Fame at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin.

Justin Ma

Subset Games, Co-Founder / Artist

Artist and designer Justin Ma teamed up with Matthew Davis to develop their first game, FTL: Faster Than Light. Released in 2012, FTL received worldwide attention and praise for uniquely putting players in the captain’s seat of a spaceship. Their second project, a minimalist tactics game called Into the Breach, was released early 2018 to critical acclaim and commercial success. Travel and food-obsessed, Justin started working in the games industry in 2009 at 2K Games Shanghai, later co-founding Subset Games in 2011.

Mundi Vondi

Klang Games, CEO / Co-Founder

Started out as a graphic designer, went into fine arts, fashion and film-making, and finally computer games. After founding Klang back in 2013 with Oddur and Ivar from CCP, he now sits as CEO of Klang which is building SEED. A massively multiplayer simulation game taking place in the future when humanity must settle on a new planet. Very passionate about the creative and visual elements of everything, loves coming up with big visions and getting people on board. Love complex big projects!

Ben Jackson

Rocksteady Studios, Lead External Development

Ben has been in the games industry for over 10 years. Starting as an Environment Artist in Scotland, he has worked on titles including Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto IV, and GTAV. Moving on to lead internal and external art teams on Playstation VR, he now heads up the external development department at Rocksteady Studios which supports all aspects of production including art content, animation, cinematics, UI and engineering.

Ziva Cizman

Outfit7, VP of Marketing

Working for Outfit7 since 2014, Ziva Cizman leads an international team as the VP of Marketing. Her focus has been on identifying the unique selling points of games as well as making sure all marketing activities can be measured. Her previous role at Google gave her an inside track to excelling at user acquisition and advertising. Global marketing campaigns for My Talking Tom 2 and Talking Tom Gold Run have helped Outfit7 achieve over 9 billion downloads and counting.

Andrew Parsons

Devolver Digital, Head of Production

Andrew Parsons is the head of production at Indie publishing label Devolver Digital. Since his introduction to the industry in 2005, he has worked in multiple disciplines in both publishing and development that run the gamut from brand management to level design. His continuing mission is to support the talented developers of the Devolver family and to help bring Indie greatness to the unwashed masses. He thinks most games are too difficult.

Saku Lehtinen

Remedy Entertainment, Art Director

Saku has worked for Remedy Entertainment since 1996. He has had a directorial role in many of Remedy’s games, most notably as Art Director for Alan Wake and Max Payne 2. His main focus is the overall game experience, especially when it comes to story-driven moments. He has also worked in areas such as audio directing, music production, art direction, franchise development, outlining content pipelines and technology functionality. Saku was the Cinematics Director on Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Alongside Sam Lake, he worked on the concept development of Quantum Break and the game’s cinematics.

Matt Conte

Oculus, Head of Developer Relations Engineering

With nearly 20 years in the game industry under his belt as a programmer, Matt and his team help developers ship their titles on all Oculus platforms at the highest quality. Prior to Oculus, he was engine programmer at Activision’s Vicarious Visions, maintaining a proprietary cross-platform game engine and toolset that powered the Skylanders franchise, and the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon HD remasters

Hendrik Lesser

remote control productions / EGDF , CEO / President

Serial entrepreneur Hendrik is well known as CEO of the international production house remote control productions and President of the EGDF. After starting out in the industry as a Producer and Product Manager he has been building a family of independent development studios throughout Europe for over 13 years, which today consists of 13 teams in five countries with more than 270 passionate game makers. Hendrik is also a co-founder and Executive Producer of Chimera Entertainment, the 60 heads strong development studio behind the AAA mobile productions Angry Birds Evolution and Angry Birds Epic (100+ million downloads) and a yet to be announced title. Besides his roles as CEO and producer, Hendrik also is an avid lobbyist for the political and academic acceptance of video games as goods of cultural value.

Lois Wang

XDS Advisory, Art Outsourcing Producer

Lois started her career working as an artist in a game outsourcing company. She developed her management experience through working with clients from all over the world making console, PC, social, mobile games as well as trading card and toys. Working at both outsourcing and development studios, the one thing that is consistent in her book is to create delightful experiences and success communication with all members in the team. Lois is determined to support both internal and external team working as one toward to the next win!

Richard Huddy

Samsung Electronics, Head of Game Ecosystem

Richard leads the Game Ecosystem Team based in Samsung Electronics’ R&D center in the UK, part of Samsung’s Galaxy GameDev program. That’s the team that supports developers in Europe (and occasionally worldwide) to make games look their best on Samsung’s high end phones. Richard has over 20 years of experience in graphics and gaming and loves pixels more than almost anything else.

Jason Sussman

Bungie Studios, Art Lead

An Army veteran from Dallas, Texas, Jason Sussman brings 18 years of gaming industry experience to his role as Lead Artist on Destiny franchise. Of those 18 years, 11 years have been spent at Bungie, designing mission, competitive multiplayer maps, and DLC environments for Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach and The Destiny franchise. Currently, Jason leads Art direction for future content being created by partner studios as well as internally.

Chris Petrovic

Zynga, SVP / Head of Corp Strategy, M&A and Bizdev

Chris is a tech and games industry veteran, with over 20 years of global experience in the sector. He currently serves as SVP and Head of Corporate Strategy, M&A and Business Development for Zynga. Chris is responsible for driving the company’s growth through strategic M&A, partnerships and market expansion efforts. To date, Chris has deployed $1B in capital through the acquisitions of Small Giant Games, Gram Games, Peak Games board and card studio, Harpan and Puzzle Social. Chris also oversees the company’s IP licensing efforts with global partners Disney (Star Wars), Warner Brothers (Harry Potter), Univeral (Fast & Furious), HBO (Game of Thrones) and World Poker Tour, and also spearheads Zynga’s emerging and new market expansion strategies and efforts.

Dino Patti

JUMPSHIP, Executive Producer / Co-Founder

With 15 years of experience in the games industry Dino Patti, has made a name for himself. Most notably he is known for his role in co-founding, scaling and running Playdead for almost 10 years while they developed and published the multi award winning titles LIMBO and INSIDE. Dino has had an advising role in several game and game related companies including the GDC Europe Advisory Board. In 2017 Dino founded JUMPSHIP with Chris Olsen, where the promising title “Somerville” is brought to life.

Joachim Ante

Unity Technologies, CTO & Co-Founder

Joachim Ante is well known Chief Technology Officer of Unity Technologies, who co-founded Unity in 2002. Joachim is responsible for writing the core of Unity in his teenage days, and today the engine is in the hands of more than 5 million registered developers. As Unity’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Joachim has brought pro-level game development tools to the masses, and is one of key game development figures responsible for democratization of game development and is playing a major role in the ongoing renaissance of independent games.

Daniel Rantala

Fingersoft, VP of Publishing

Daniel is the CEO of Round Zero, a Finnish mobile game publisher operating as a part Fingersoft, a game developer with over 1 billion installs and 50+ million monthly active users. Daniel has a significant amount of experience in the fields of overall game publishing, management, business development, and analytics. Daniel knows the pros (considerable success) and cons (revenue decline and downfall) of the games industry through experience, and is eager to share his findings with other game developers.

Sam Carlisle

Microsoft, Sr. Director, External Partner Relations

Sam came to the games industry with a background in Behavioural Analysis as a consultant specializing in training businesses in negotiation and partnering. Working with a management consultancy group he helped a diverse range of companies from multinationals to supermarket chains as they made the difficult cultural transition into partnering and strategic alliancing. During this time Sam also maintained a passion for comics and gaming; co-founding a comic book studio in the mid-nineties before going on to work freelance in comics, commercial illustration and design. In 2006 he committed full time to games by joining Sumo Digital as an artist and becoming Outsource Manager in 2009. In this position he successfully guided Sumo’s Indian art studio into becoming a fully integrated partner, while managing the developer’s rapidly expanding outsource program which stretched across several simultaneous (often cross-platform) titles for a variety of publishers, including Microsoft, Sony, Sega and EA.

Christopher Bergstresser

MTG, Investment Executive

Christopher has been in the games industry for over 25 years and has been with some of the biggest brand names – Sega, Konami, Atari and Miniclip. Over the years, Chris has had several start-ups, raised millions in venture capital and has had some great exits, the most recent being the sale of Appscotch to AppAnnie. Currently, Chris is an investment executive with Modern Times Group (MTG) where he is focused on both investments and M&A.

Benjamin Charbit

Darewise Entertainment, CEO

CEO of Parisian studio Darewise Entertainment and Vice President of Syndicat National du Jeu Vidéo, Charbit’s rise within the videogames industry has been swift. With his origins in investment banking he brought an analytical eye, economic savvy and a personal passion for video games to his debut role at Ubisoft in 2011. Initially accountable for the monetisation design, development and strategy in the Ubisoft’s F2P teams, in 2013 Benjamin took key learnings from the games-as-a-service division into the world of AAA development, becoming Content and Monetisation Director on Assassin’s Creed. In January 2018 he, along with Viktor Antonov opened Darewise Entertainment as a development studio.

Rami Ismail

Vlambeer, CEO

Rami Ismail is the Business & Development Guy at Vlambeer, a
Dutch independent game studio known best for Nuclear Throne, Wasteland Kings, Ridiculous Fishing, Super Crate Box, LUFTRAUSERS, GUN GODZ, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter & Radical Fishing. Believing sharing knowledge openly is the cornerstone of independent development, Rami has spoken on a variety of subjects at dozens of game events around the world. His current big project is organizing Gamedev.world, a truly unique online game developers conference.

Renee Blair

Six Foot, Game Designer

Renee Blair is currently a game designer for Six Foot, focusing on combat and systems design for Dreadnought. Previously she has worked for Hi-Rez Studios and Boss Key Productions on Jetpack Fighter, LawBreakers, and Radical Heights. In academia Renee has worked in education, UX, and accessibility, earning her master’s degree in human-computer interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Renee is also regularly involved in game jams and conferences, having previously participated in Pirate Jam, as a speaker for the Xbox Women in Gaming Luncheon, and as an IGDA Scholar.

Martin Eder

Bongfish, Lead Level Artist

Martin has been working at Bongfish for around 11 years, he has started his company career as a level designer and is leading the Environment Art team for 4 years now. He was working on several titles for consoles, PC and mobile. Martin studied contemporary art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, shifted soon after his studies into the gaming industry, where he is able to combine his passion for gaming and technology with the creation of artistic open world environments. Currently he is working on the development of a new unannounced big title for PC.

Andrej Levenski

Gamepires, Technical Director / Co-Founder

Andrej is an industry veteran of 16 years and the Technical Director at Gamepires. He has been a programmer for much longer, almost 22 years, starting out as an enthusiast with his friends. He co-founded Gamepires 8 years ago, working on the in-house PranaEngine used on the award-winning Gas Guzzlers Extreme racing combat game, and has spent the last 2 years working in UE4 on SCUM, a multiplayer survival game currently in Early Access. His interests and experience span all technical areas of the game development.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi

Enhance, CEO / Founder

Mizuguchi is best known as the creator behind critically acclaimed, award-winning titles including Sega Rally Championship, Space Channel 5, Rez, Lumines/Lumines Remastered, Child of Eden, Rez Infinite and Tetris Effect. His lifelong pursuit of research centered around activating one’s imagination and elevating human consciousness through media has resulted in crafting highly unique, one-of-a-kind experiences across video games, music and live performances. At Enhance, Mizuguchi is committed to conceptualizing and developing synesthetic, next-level entertainment experiences through the power of emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR).

Dragan Jerosimovic

3Lateral, Game Engine Programmer

Dragan Jerosimovic works at 3Lateral (now part of Epic Games) on integration of their next-gen digital character technologies into Unreal Engine 4. He has been designing and developing games and tools for making them for the past 33 years, starting as a kid on ZX Spectrum 48K. Since that time, he implemented several game editors and experimental programming languages for making games, one of which was used for production of Metamorf’s Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade. He also made games at Emerging Dreams, Supersonic Parachute, LevelBit and TabTale. As his early roots were in text adventures, he never stopped thinking about the problem of interactive storytelling, even dipping his toes into AI in hope to solve it.

Robin Hunicke

Funomena, Co-Founder / CEO

Robin Hunicke is the Co-founder of the independent, San Francisco game studio Funomena. Her titles include Luna (PS4), Journey (PS3), Boom Blox (Wii) and MySims (Wii). She is also Professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz, Director of the Art Games & Playable Media BA and the Digital Arts and New Media MFA. Robin is also an outspoken evangelist for diversity of thought and participation in both design and business. She believes that by broadening the game community and expanding the feelings game designs explore, developers will make better, more broadly appealing games.

Steve Escalante

Versus Evil, General Manager / Founder

Steve Escalante is the General Manager and founder of independent games publisher, Versus Evil. An industry veteran with 19 years of game development and publishing experience, Escalante started his own indie development team in 1999 to then just prior to Versus Evil served as the Director of Marketing at Bethesda Softworks. Now with these past five years running Versus Evil, Escalante’s indie roots and AAA publishing background is being leveraged in the sales, marketing, distribution and business development needs for mobile, console and PC games.

Igor Cesi

Ubisoft Paris, Senior Programmer

Igor Cesi is a senior programmer at Ubisoft Paris studio where he helped making 10+ games including multiple titles in Ghost Recon and Just Dance franchises. The latest game he participated in is Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle. He has been programming games in C++ for the last 20 years.

Anne Toole

Writer

Writers Guild Award-winner Anne Toole has written for video games, TV & digital series, animation, comics, and more. Her credits include Curse of The Pharaohs for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Horizon Zero Dawn, IGF nominee Where the Water Tastes like Wine; and the Emmy-winning webseries The Lizzie Benner Diaries. She also created Alles Liebe, Annette, a short-form series for the German market. Next, her work will appear on Netflix’s anime series Cannon Busters.

Neil Alphonso

Splash Damage, Creative Director

Neil Alphonso is a Creative Director at Splash Damage and was instrumental in the inception and live phase of Dirty Bomb. Neil’s successful 10-year career at Splash Damage has also seen him help bring Batman: Arkham Origins multiplayer and BRINK to fruition. Before coming to Splash Damage, Neil’s globe-trotting seventeen-year career included such hits as the original Tom Clancy’s: Splinter Cell from Ubisoft Montreal and Killzone 2 from Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam.

Estelle Tigani

Treyarch, Associate Producer

Estelle started her career at The Walt Disney Company, then moved into game development in 2014 working as a Producer on Ghostbusters with Fireforge and Activision. She then worked at Loot Crate Interactive, where she launched the Alternate Reality Game The Secret Order of the Keys and a number of other mobile titles. In 2017, Estelle joined Treyarch as an Associate Producer and is currently working on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Marco Minoli

Slitherine, Marketing Director

Marco started in games marketing in 1998. After experiences in Eidos and Electronic Arts, he soon discovered his hidden love for niches. He joined Slitherine in 2007 and contributed to grow it from a strategy games developer into a successful publishing powerhouse. After twenty years into games, an open mind and a vision that knowledge and information are the key to grow sustainable businesses, Marco is still eager to grow its audience, learn from an ever-changing landscape and share his experience with as many stakeholders as possible.

Pawel Rohleder

Techland, CTO

A highly experienced developer, leader and video games enthusiast who is keen on new technologies. Right now working on shared technology for two amazing AAA titles at Techland (Dying Light 2 and another big unannounced AAA project). He has over 15 years in the game development industry, of which the last 12 years are with Techland (known for Dying Light, Dead Island, Call of Juarez. Currently he is responsible for a team of 50+ programmers developing cutting-edge technology and systems for games across multiple platforms.

Catherine Channon

PR Expert

Beginning her career in independent retail and trade marketing Cat moved into journalism in 1998. She worked in radio, TV, specialist online and print media. At Vivendi she launched World of Warcraft and Half Life 2. At Take-Two she was behind the scenes for the launch of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. As Head of International Communications at Warner Bros. she led publicity, community, social media and influencer campaigns for huge gaming and entertainment brands including: LEGO, Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat and Lord of The Rings. An avid campaigner with an ethical but commercial approach to comms she has also spent the last decade working on pro-bono and not-or-profit communications campaigns both inside and out of the games industry with no budget and limited resources.

Chris Avellone

Writer / Game Designer / Creator of Worlds

Chris Avellone is best known for his work on a number of role-playing games over the past 20+ years, including Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Fallout (2 and New Vegas), Divinity: Original Sin II, and Prey. Recent works include Into the Breach with Subset Games (the makers of FTL), Pathfinder: Kingmaker with Owlcat Games, and Techland’s Dying Light 2.

Dan Murray

Skybound Interactive, President

Dan Murray oversees Skybound Entertainment’s robust gaming business. He works closely with the industry’s leading publishers, developers and investors to extend Skybound’s IP into mobile and console games. Skybound’s game slate among others includes Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, Scopely’s The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Night School’s Oxenfree. In addition, Skybound Interactive has a handful of video game projects in the pipeline including Overkill’s The Walking Dead from Starbreeze and Rival Games’ Thief of Thieves.

Ryan Payton

Camouflaj, CEO and Founder

Ryan is the founder and CEO of Camouflaj, and advisor to Kowloon Nights and Makers Fund. Ryan started his career as producer on Metal Gear Solid 4 at Kojima Productions in Tokyo. He then returned home to direct Halo 4 at Microsoft until he started Camouflaj, a Seattle-based game studio behind République and a new, recently announced game he won’t be able to talk about!

Tamara Popovic

Mad Head Games, System Designer

Tamara Popovic is a system designer at Mad Head Games, currently working on their up-and-coming aRPG Pagan Online. Before joining the gaming industry, she gained extensive experience in testing and solving user experience problems on different digital platforms. When she’s not playing or making video games, she’s working on her PhD in cognitive psychology.

Guy Richards

ID@Xbox, Strategic Partner Manager

Guy has been with Microsoft’s Global Gaming Partnerships & Development team for nearly 3 years. He partners with the industry’s leading independent publishers to explore opportunities within Microsoft’s evolving gaming ecosystem, including new initiatives such as Xbox Game Pass. Guy previously spent 5 years at PlayStation managing PlayStation VR, supporting the launch of PS4 and working with early adopters of digital self-publishing on PS3. His career and expertise of digital publishing started at Electronic Arts in 2010.

Richard Franke

Magic Notion, Director / Kitty Powers

Richard Franke is the Director of Magic Notion Ltd and the creator of Kitty Powers’
Matchmaker and Kitty Powers’ Love Life. He also plays Kitty Powers’ herself, the drag
queen star of both games. Richard started doing drag around 2008 as a hobby, for a number of reasons, his love of costumes, his love of drag queens, and his desire to get better at being in front of a crowd! Richard has worked on many award-winning AAA games in a variety of roles and in several genres since graduating, including Burnout, Need for Speed, BLACK, Tearaway, Dreams etc.

James Green

Creative Assembly, Lead Game Designer

James is a lead game designer with over 13 years’ experience across multiple specialties including systems, level and multiplayer design, and various platforms having worked on PC, console and mobile. He is currently working on a top secret Total War project for the UK’s largest developer, Creative Assembly. His previous credits span the studio’s history, having worked on Alien: Isolation, Halo Wars 2 and a plethora of Total War titles including Shogun 2: Total War and Empire: Total War.

Damjan Mravunac

Croteam, Composer / Sound Designer

Damjan is best known as the in-house audio guru for Croatia’s oldest and most reputable studio, Croteam. He is currently composing tunes and designing sound effects for Serious Sam 4, the next instalment in the long-running franchise about aliens attacking the Earth and dying a horrible death while screaming in remarkably high quality as a melodic hybrid metal-orchestral score commemorates their passing.

Eran Alboher

Ekipa2 part of Outfit7 Group, Senior Art Director

Eran Alboher first lent his unique, intuitive art style to TV and film projects as a character designer and animator, before switching to his first games industry role at Tabtale. From there he made the move to Outfit7 Group where, as Senior Art Director, he lead the artistic vision that brought My Talking Tom 2 to life.

Nika Dvoravic

Croteam, Level Designer / Environment Artist

Nika is a Level Designer and Environment Artist at Croteam. She has worked on titles such as Serious Sam VR The Last Hope, First Encounter VR and Second Encounter VR. Currently at Croteam she is working on their biggest game project to date – Serious Sam 4. She holds an architecture degree and has worked as an architect prior to joining the game industry. Her biggest interests include photoscanning, photogrammetry, photorealism and hard surface modeling. Nika is also one of the Women in Games (WIGJ UK) Ambassadors.

Jean-François Boivin

Panache Digital, Co-Founder / Producer

Co-Founder and Producer of Panache Digital Games, JF has been in the game industry since 2005 overseeing various production management positions. His shipped titles include Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood as well as a few within the Nintendo, Star Wars and Splinter Cell franchises. He is also a board member of the Independent Video Game Developers Guild of Quebec, a cooperative of over 160 independent video game developers and the largest of its kind in the world. Previous to being in the video game industry, JF developed custom-based web solutions for Fortune 500 companies.

Noirin Carmody

Revolution Software, Co-Founder / COO

Noirin Carmody founder and COO at Revolution Software is responsible for strategic business affairs. Noirin is the Executive Producer of Revolution’s games including the Broken Sword Series and recently announced Beneath a Steel Sky 2. She was voted one of the top UK 100 women in Games in 2013. Noirin is an elected board member of the UK Interactive Entertainment Games Association (Ukie) and is a voting member of BAFTA. She also holds a number of pro bono appointments.

Charles Cecil

Revolution Software, CEO / Co-Founder

Charles Cecil has been a key figure in the interactive entertainment industry for over 30 years. CEO and co-founder of Revolution Software, Charles created the multi-million selling Broken Sword series which is one of the world’s most successful adventure fran-
chises. Charles was awarded the status of ‘industry legend’ by Develop, Europe’s leading development magazine. Currently him and his team at Revolution Software are working on redefining classical adventure game genre while developing their next big game.

James Portnow

Extra Credits / Rainmaker Games, Writer / CEO

Best known for writing the web series Extra Credits, James Portnow is a game designer and consultant known for his theories on socially positive design. He received his Masters from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center and went on to work for Activision as a designer on the Call of Duty series before raising funds to start his own company, Divide by Zero Games. He currently serves as the CEO of Rainmaker Games, a design and consulting firm that has worked with partners from Zynga to Riot Games, in addition to writing the popular Extra Credits and Extra History series.

Larisa Percinlic

Ekipa2 part of Outfit7 Group, Director of Design and Animation

Starting out as a multi-skilled game artist at Zootfly, Larisa Percinlic has been a UI art specialist at Outfit7 Group since 2015. She prides herself on designing UI that “players love to touch”, and has done so on global hits like My Talking Tom 2, Talking Tom Gold Run, My Talking Hank and Talking Tom Pool. She’s currently leading the UI team on Outfit7 Group’s next, as-yet-unannounced big release.

Johannes Kuhlmann

Deep Silver Fishlabs, Head of Core Technologies

Johannes is Head of Core Technologies at Deep Silver Fishlabs. Never shying away from a challenge, he finds particular joy in solving difficult problems and creating powerful technology that is easy to use. He has been in the games industry for more than 10 years by now, even if it feels a lot shorter. He started out building technology for the Nintendo DS and soon moved on to work on the LittleBigPlanet franchise. At Deep Silver Fishlabs, together with his team he built the in-house engine and now focuses on adapting existing titles to new platforms.

Paul Wedgewood

Supernova Capital, Founder

Entrepreneur and gaming fanatic, Paul Wedgwood started London based video games developer Splash Damage in 2001. Under Paul’s leadership, Splash Damage has grown from a modest games development team to a studio which has created some of the world’s most engaging multiplayer experiences. After 17 years at the helm, Paul stepped down as CEO of Splash Damage and founded Supernova Capital LLP, with the goal to build more happy, healthy and profitable studios worldwide.

Ilari Kuittinen

Housemarque, CEO

Ilari Kuittinen is the CEO of Housemarque and has been managing the award-winning Finnish game studio for over 20 years. Mr. Kuittinen co-founded the company with Harri Tikkanen in 1995. Housemarque has created several critically acclaimed hits over the years including one of the best reviewed games of 2017 Nex Machina (Metacritic 88), the PS4 launch title Resogun and critics favorite Outland for PS3 & Xbox 360. The studio is currently employing over 50 talented game developers at the downtown Helsinki studio.

Zeb West

Stoic, Senior Producer

Zeb met Arnie, John and Alex, key member of Stoic studio working as a producer at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic. As project manager of both Triple A and Indie games, he strives to foster creativity, humanity and humor among artists, programmers and designers. Recently he has been active in key producer role on Banner Saga series. When not working in video games, he creates silly works of puppetry about cosmic angst and performs them at burlesque shows.

Alen Ladavac

Croteam, CTO / Co-Founder

Alen Ladavac is leading the technology team as well as working on all aspects of Croteam games since 1993. Now mainly heading the efforts on Serious Sam 4 development, his previous work includes the world-famous Serious Sam franchise and critically acclaimed The Talos Principle, as well as a series of console, VR and mobile versions of those games. His broad range of interests and experience spans all technical areas of the game development, from rendering, sound and physics, to networking, build systems and content pipelines.

Jen MacLean

IGDA / IGDA Foundation, Executive Director

As the Executive Director of the IGDA and IGDA Foundation, Jen MacLean works to build a more inclusive game development community and support game developers around the world in achieving sustainable, fulfilling careers. From the start of her career as a playtester at Microprose Software, through senior roles at AOL, Comcast, 38 Studios, and StoryArc Media, Jen has managed game development, strategy, marketing, business development and partnerships across multiple gaming platforms. She was named one of the “Game Industry’s 100 Most Influential Women” by Next Generation, one of the “Top 20 Women in Games” by Gamasutra.

Jonas Antonsson

Raw Fury, Troublemaker / Founder

Jonas is an Icelandic entrepreneur that has founded several companies in the games space. 6 years ago he moved to Sweden, where he worked at Paradox Interactive. In the beginning of 2015 he founded Raw Fury, and independent publisher of games, which he now runs. The company has established itself firmly in a short time and enjoyed success for both itself and the developers that it has worked with. Some of Jonas’s friends suspect he might be a vampire. He does not deny that this might be true.

Eugen Harton

Bohemia Interactive, Project Lead

Eugen started his career in games with Pixel Federation and now works at Bohemia Interactive, utilizing his experience from enterprise architecture. Joined the team of DayZ Standalone developers couple months into the early access release as an engineer and moved into production and project management. Keeping up with the pace and demands of the project. Aiming to solve hot topics of early access, modding, cheating.

SWERY Hidetaka Suehiro

White Owls Inc., CEO

One of Japan’s representative indie developers. He continues to create unique, spirited work based on the slogan: “From Osaka to all of YOU around the world.” His newest game “The MISSING – J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories” was lauded as a “very important game” by many media sources and received high praise internationally, such as being nominated for the “Games for Impact” category in the Game Awards 2018. His other representative works include “Deadly Premonition,” “D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die,” “Spy Fiction,” etc. His next game, “The Good Life,” is planned to be released in 2019.

Diana Moldavsky

Tencent, Director, International Partnerships

Diana is Director of International Partnerships at Tencent Games Europe where she focuses on partnerships and investments and covers Eastern Europe out of Tencent EU HQ in Amsterdam. She has many years of experience in tech and gaming in business development and investment roles, both in Silicon Valley, Eastern Europe and internationally. She was CRO at Zeptolab (Cut the Rope), a partner at an early stage venture fund and worked for companies such as Google, Yandex and OLX (Naspers group). She has also advised startups, funds and done angel investments.

Toby Ow

Sony Interactive Entertainment, Production Supervisor

Toby is responsible for budgeting and supervising projects supporting Sony Worldwide Studios developers in art, motion capture, scanning, animation, cinematics, and external development. He has helped manage outsourced waterfall and agile projects for game art assets, game co-development, R&D software technologies, and internal studio project management tools for PS3, PS Vita, and PS4 exclusive titles.

Arnold Nesis

Capricia Productions, CEO / Composer

Arnold Nesis is an Israeli metal-head and music composer, mostly known for his work in video games and media. Arnold has worked with companies in the United States, Europe, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere and currently is the CEO of Capricia Productions, making interactive music video game albums. Recently, the company has been focusing on the development of The Birdcage – a music album fully produced as a video game, featuring leading artists from Guns N’ Roses, (former) Evanescence, Within Temptation, Epica and others.

Julie Heyde

VRUnicorns, Co-Founder / CEO

Julie Heyde is a game developer + #ChickenBitch @VRUnicorns. She has a creation crush on semi-realistic VR sports games with a twist of dark humor & brutality alongside a passion for quirky flat games. IRL she is in the forest with her pony Shayla or sporting in the ocean.

Louis-Felix Cauchon

Quebec Video Game Developers Guild / Borealys Games, Co-Founder / President

Louis-Felix co-founded the video game company Artifice Studio, which will give birth to the very first title based on the Quebec culture and folklore Sang-Froid. Later he co-founded Games Borealys which launched in 2017 its first game Mages of Mystralia. In 2015, he founded The Independent Video Game Developers Guild as a non-profit producer co-op. The group becomes from its foundation the largest official group of independent video game developers in the world (166 studios). Through The Guild, Louis-Félix created the MEGA festival, The musical video game Odyssey and JamNATION.

Hrvoje Kelemenic

LGM, Lead Engine Developer

Hrvoje Kelemenić joined Little Green Men Games in 2012 when the studio began its work on Starpoint Gemini 2. Since then he was a core member of studio that created a number of successful titles in the series on both PC and Xbox One, along with numerous expansions. Those games ended up popularizing his novel take on technical UI design among developers working on similar titles, setting new industry standards in the process. He currently works as the lead engine developer on LGM’s new, yet undisclosed flagship project.

Stefanie Scherer

Bongfish, Marketing and Community Specialist

Stefanie started out as a Community Manager at Women in Games International. After graduating from the University of Graz with her Master Thesis on “Music and Sound in Games – their function, interactivity and atmosphere in 2015, she started working as Marketing and Community Specialist at Bongfish for the Smurfs Mobile Game franchise. She focuses on the role of the Community in game development, psychological pricing and covers all social media platforms for Smurfs’ Village. Besides that, she is a Community and Marketing specialist at Dyadic Games, which are currently working on their Nintendo Switch release of Sikanda, a Fantasy Action-Adventure/RPG inspired by famous Japanese SNES classics of the 90s.

Tomasz Kaczmarczyk

SUPERHOT Team, Founder / Business Director

Tom is the guy running business stuff in SUPERHOT Team, the studio most people recognize for their undeniably consistent naming skills and the blockbuster indie hits SUPERHOT and SUPERHOT VR. Tom was one of the original founders of the studio and has had the pleasure of seeing it grow from 5 people working on borrowed desks in 2014 to a still growing crowd of over 40 people with offices in two cities in 2018. Personally, he’s hoping to turn more indie devs away from treating business development as an elaborate cargo cult and lure them towards the fine art of actually looking at a goddamn spreadsheet for a change

Jakub Dvorský

Amanita Design, CEO / Creative Director

Jakub is the founder, lead game designer and creative director in Amanita Design, Czech based award-winning independent studio best known for multi-platform adventure games Machinarium, Botanicula, Samorost series and CHUCHEL. The studio currently consists of five standalone teams working on several new exciting games.

Andrej Kovacevic

Exoridum Games, Game Director / Board Member

Andrej’s passion for games as a medium is spilling over into many different fields. This is shown through running Exordium Games as Managing Director and co-owner being most known for their acclaimed adventure series Bear With Me, through writing an indie column for the regional gaming culture magazine Reboot as well as being very active in CGDA with lobbying and building a better eco-system for game development in Croatia.

Quentin Guislain

European Games Group, Head of Marketing

Quentin is a seasoned marketeer who has been navigating from a brand and social media agency to the digital fitness industry to now leading the marketing department at GamesGroup, a f2p game publisher based in Munich, Germany. There he, together with his team, constantly aims at maximizing marketing’s contribution to product development and user growth.

Doug North Cook

Chatham University / Fallingwater Institute, Professor

Doug North Cook is the professor behind the Bachelor of Arts in Immersive Media program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh where he teaches and conducts research. He also runs the Immersive Design Residency at the Fallingwater Institute, develops immersive narrative experiences and games with a small team at Decoder, and writes about architectural and design theory as it relates to immersive design. Doug’s work combines his passion for immersive technology with his obsession with architecture, design thinking and theory, and storytelling.

Nikola Cavic

GameBiz / SGA, MD / Chairman

Nikola Čavić is Managing Director at the GameBiz consulting firm and Chairman at the Serbian Games Association. Previously, he served seven years as the Head of Business Development at Nordeus – the independent gaming studio best known for Top Eleven, one the world’s most successful mobile sports game. Prior to Nordeus, he spent 5 years with CCP Games where he was responsible for global distribution of EVE Online. During the last 12 years, Nikola has been involved in a number of international projects with global leaders in the sports & games industry.

Karlo Jez

Croteam, Senior Engine Developer

Karlo Jež is a senior engine developer at Croteam who also dabbles in game and tools programming. With a huge interest in graphics and multi-platform support, Karlo is one of the key figures in Croteam’s presence on almost all gaming platforms known to man, including PC, consoles, mobile and VR. When he’s not writing code and developing the Serious Engine and Serious Sam 4, Karlo is making worlds as a co-founder and team lead of a small indie game-dev team currently working on a turn–based action RPG.

Tomislav Pongrac

Gamepires, Creative Director / Co-Founder

During the late 80s, Tomislav started experimenting with 2D-computer graphics for the Amiga demo scene. In the mid-90s, his group of friends got together and founded Croteam, where he worked on many games including the Serious Sam series. In the last 25 years, he has worked on nearly all aspects of the artistic part of gamedev – concept art, 2D, 3D, animation, level design, game design, gameplay, and other. At the moment, Tomislav is the creative director at Gamepires, a super ambitious team currently working on their huge open world survival game SCUM.

Jakub Marek

SuperScale, Head of Big Data & Monetization

Jakub Marek is a veteran industry expert that helped fast-growing game companies like Fingersoft, BoomBit, Frogmind & Dodreams to significantly improve business performance through better understanding needs of their more than 2 billion strong player-base through data.

Carsten Orthbandt

zeuz.io, CTO

Carsten is a seasoned industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience. Today he pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in multiplayer infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions. Carsten has always been a technology frontrunner, employing modern development tools and strategies ever since he started his career at Terratools. After, he founded SEK in Berlin, where he served as Development Director before becoming Managing Director at pixeltamer.net, finally moving on to zeuz.io.

Alon Or-bach

Samsung Electronics, Senior Software Engineer

Alon works in the Game Ecosystem Team in Samsung Electronics’ R&D center in the UK, part of Samsung’s Galaxy GameDev program. He has been deeply involved in mobile graphics since 2006 and represents Samsung within the Khronos Group. Alon engages with game developers and Samsung’s GPU partners to shape the Vulkan API to make gaming on Android better and better with every passing year.

Sebastien Benard

Motion Twin, Lead Game Designer

Sebastien prefers making games to playing them. He has spent a large part of his life creating games, finished or unfinished projects, and he participated in quite a lot of gamejams (and won more then few). After 15 yrs of web and F2P game development at Motion Twin, his team decided to jump in PC and console markets, with their recently released and critically acclaimed game Dead Cells that launched with overwhelming success.

Robert Sajko

Croteam, Senior Engine/Gameplay Programmer

Robert Sajko is a hands-on developer and a 10-year veteran at Croteam, where he has helped ship a number of key titles on multiple platforms, including Serious Sam 3: BFE, The Talos Principle and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. While he excels in engineering, his interests span beyond that. Alongside his partner in crime, Karlo Jez, he is a co-founder of a small indie game-dev team currently working on a turn-based action RPG, where he took on the role of a lead game designer.

Renaud Charpentier

Tower Five, Game Director / Co-Founder

Renaud joined the games industry more than two decades ago when he helped a few friends on what would today be called an Indie game. He then designed games for Ubisoft, Insight Games and Sega at Creative Assembly, working on brands like Rayman, Splinter Cell, Largo Winch, Corunea and Total War. His last position before leaving Creative Assembly was that of a game director. Currently he is quietly and secretively working as game director on his next big thing! Currently he is quietly and secretively working as game director on his next big thing at Tower Five, completely new studio he recently co-founded! Game design, game rules and systems, including artificial intelligence remains his primary interests, with a focus on transforming player experience intentions into systems which actually materialise them.

Ivan Trancik

SuperScale, CEO

As a CEO of SuperScale, Ivan pioneered a white-label publishing approach to help talented game developers to get invested, improve, market and scale their games under their own brand. Together with his team he has worked to launch and scale over 100 games with over 2 billion downloads – growth partners of SuperScale include fast growing game studios like Fingersoft, Frogmind (in partnership with Supercell), BoomBit, DoDreams, Traplight, Paradox and others. Some of the more notable games are Hill Climb Racing 2 and recent launches of Badland Brawl, Tanks A Lot and Darts Club. Likes pineapples with pizzas on top.

Anya Combs

Kickstarter Games, Senior Games Outreach

Anya Combs is the Senior Games Outreach person at Kickstarter. She has been in the digital games space for over a decade, overseeing multiple mobile and online titles launched for Nickelodeon & AddictingGames, and has worked with countless game creators launching successful projects on Kickstarter. She is excited to continue supporting game devs as they bring their creative projects to life. Anya has also played the saxophone for 20+ years and plays in too many bands in NYC. She doesn’t sleep much.

Julian Mautner

stillalive studios, CEO

Julian is the founder and managing director of stillalive studios, best known for the Bus Simulator series and the highly anticipated SciFi strategy game Drone Swarm. Over the past 7 years, he has formed an internationally respected team of talented devs, focused on technically ambitious simulation, management and strategy games. The growing team of stillalive studios creates own IPs like Drone Swarm and Rescue HQ as well as it works on franchises like Bus Simulator. Four years ago, the studio released the Kickstarter backed action-adventure Son of Nor.

Tom Crago

Tantalus, CEO

Tom is the CEO and owner of Melbourne-based videogame developer Tantalus, a studio with more than forty acclaimed titles to its credit, including a handful of million-unit sellers such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD. Tom is a past President of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia. He is presently a Board Member of the not-for-profit Australian National Development Index. His first book, Flashbacks from the Flow Zone is published internationally by Hardie Grant, and his hybrid artwork/videogame Materials recently appeared at the inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial, in what was the largest art exhibition ever staged in Australia.

Vanja Todoric

Mad Head Games, Senior Artist

Vanja Todoric graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. He is proud to say that some of his work has been awarded and published by: CGsociety, 3Dtotal, Layer paint, EXPOSE, SPECTRUM, PRIME, 2D Artist Magazine, Digital Painting Techniques, Digital Painters, Imagine FX. He is working as a Senior Artist at MadHead Games, and also teaching Concept Art for Video Games and Movies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Novi Sad (Illustration Department).

Susan Gold

Global Game Jam, Co-Founder & President

Susan is a 20 year industry veteran and academic scholar who understood the need for her students and in turn, the game community to constantly grow and innovate. Susan started the Global Game Jam (GGJ) as a place for students and developers to come together, experiment, fail and innovate while having fun. The annual event has turned into a weekend of excitement and new ideas, new friends and new games. 2019 boasting over 47K participants and 9K new games made in 113 countries. Susan also works on numerous projects that utilize games to promote positive social impact and create opportunities for developing countries to share their culture and get their games seen and played.

Jari-Pekka Kaleva

EGDF, COO

As the COO of European Games Developer Federation (EGDF), Jari-Pekka Kaleva follows European politics from the games industry perspective. He is also the senior policy analyst at Neogames, working to accelerate, coordinate and support the development of the Finnish games industry.

Ari Pulkkinen

AriTunes, CEO / Composer

Ari is an award winning composer and sound designer. With over 15 years of professional experi-ence, his works include original and award winning music and audio for games such as Angry Birds, Nex Machina, Resogun, Alienation, Super Stardust HD and Trine -series. Among many awards that Ari gathered throughout the years just some of those that stand out are Hall of Fame in Pocket Gamer, Finnish Game Developer of the Year 2011 and Best PS4 Audio Award 2013 from Resogun by IGN and many others.

Luka Hrabar

Croteam, Terrain Engine Programmer

Luka is one of the newer additions to the Croteam crew with just 3 years under his belt. Starting with gameplay and engine programming, he immediately showed that he would gladly involve himself in any and all aspects of game development. Consequently, Luka is currently working on one of Croteam’s largest technological challenges yet – the terrain engine. Even after years’ worth of feature additions the terrain engine and its toolkit is ever-growing. Much to his amusement, Luka is among the select few who know how and why it all works.

Tomislav Gojevic

Nanobit, Business Development / Project Manager

Tomislav has been a gamer his whole life, and has worked in the gaming industry for the past 4 years. As a business development and project manager in Nanobit he makes sure that projects are delivered on time, that they bring value and fun to the people using them and a sense of pride to the people creating them! He’s a reliable and energetic problem solver who enjoys interacting with people and optimizing business operations. He has a very cool nickname, Tomahawk, from his early hoop-shooting days, and his all-time fave games include Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Max Payne, God of War and Uncharted.

Jose Emilio Munoz

Arm, Software Engineer

With a background in Electronics and Computer Science, José Emilio joined Arm to work on the Mali family of GPUs, initially on their driver development and instrumentation tools, and for the past two years on performance analysis and developer support for mobile gaming.

Mihai Pohontu

Amber, CEO

Mihai is the CEO of Amber, a game development agency headquartered in Bucharest, Romania. Previously Mihai was VP of Emerging Platforms at Samsung, building its developer ecosystem. Before Samsung, he oversaw Product Operations at Disney Interactive, a team of 600+ staff across 9 locations around the world. Prior to Disney, Mihai was the VP and GM of Central Development Services at Electronic Arts, overseeing operational teams supporting 18 development studios on 3 continents. He founded and was the GM of EA Romania, one of the largest game development studios in Eastern Europe.

Kris Rose

Khronos Group, Developer Relations

Kris’ background lands squarely between computer hardware and the video game industry having worked at both Intel and AMD on their Developer Relations teams. He now heads up Developer Relations globally at The Khronos Group where he is working on improving the overall developer experience around Vulkan and evangelising the API. Kris is also currently advising a UK start-up developing an exciting new graphics technique that could change how we view computer graphics in the near future. Kris also assists game developers with unique projects to make connections with publishers and platform holders.

Ante Odic

Ekipa2 part of Outfit7 Group, Fellow Data Scientist

Ante Odic worked at Ljubljana’s Faculty of Engineering, where he earned a PhD in context-aware recommender systems, before joining Outfit7 Group in 2013. There he has progressed from hands-on user behavior analysis to leading a large team of data scientists, and now promotes data-driven decision making at a strategic level. He has co-designed big systems – such as ad-mediation and cross promotion – for Outfit7 Group’s mobile games, and has been instrumental in developing an analytics infrastructure capable of drawing answers from a 3TB daily data stream in a matter of seconds.

Maarten de Koning

DDM, Partner / Executive VP of BD

Maarten de Koning has over 13+ years of experience in executive, entrepreneurial and advisory positions in the game industry with a strong background in investment management. As partner and Executive VP of Business Development, he oversees business development and the expansion and consultation of DDM’s clients in Europe and Asia (Japan excluded). Previously, he co-founded production house Green Hill, providing agency, production and development services for game studios, publishers and investors. DDM acquired Green Hill on February 2013, granting Maarten the position of Partner and Executive VP.

Davor Tomicic

Croteam, Co-Founder / Game Designer

Working in game development since mid 1990’s. During
the time he worked on various aspects of game creation including game design, level design, gameplay mechanics and scripting, story writing and more. He worked on The Talos Principle, Serious Sam series, it’s VR spinoff and is currently working on Serious Sam 4 and always experimenting with new things. Craving for perfection, he brings high standards to projects he participates.

Ben Judd

DDM, Partner, Executive VP of DDM Japan

The first foreign producer at a major Japanese publisher, Ben worked on a variety of Capcom’s biggest franchises from Resident Evil and Devil May Cry to classics like Mega Man. His experience in the US branch office and the Japanese head office, along with producing multiple international collaborative projects, gives him a unique understanding of how to best negotiate deals between companies several oceans apart. Ben leads DDM’s Japanese initiative as it continues to expand its global reach.

Ste Curran

Game Designer / Speaker / Consultant

Ste Curran is a game designer, speaker and consultant. He works with small teams around the world to assess and develop prototypes, and writes and delivers monologues about life and design which have been described as “life-changing” and “an hour of nothing”. He co-presents One Life Left, the oldest videogame radio show in the world; co-hosts Marioke, the popular game development karaoke singalong, and co-founded the Gelato Diners Conference, San Francisco’s most delicious GDC. He wrote this bio on his own.

Tomislav Uzelac

2x2 Games, CEO

Tomislav joined the world of video games industry a decade ago as an indie developer, following several long stints as programmer on music related projects (most famously creating the mp3 playback engine for WinAMP). His first project was Unity of Command, a strategy game noted for its clever design, merciless AI and “exceptional ergonomics”. Tomislav’s interests include game design, game programming in python, and all things related to the business of indie game development and he is currently intesively working on finishi development of Unity of Command 2 with lunch to happen in next few month.

Deborah Guzman Barrios

Oculus, Developer Relations

As part of the Developer Relations team at Oculus, Deborah works closely with developers and publishers during all phases of development. As a lifelong gamer, she is super excited about VR and its potential to bring us into new uncharted worlds where we can experience anything.

Swen Vincke

Larian Studios, CEO / Creative Director

Swen is the founder and CEO of Larian Studios. He’s been active in the games industry 1997 and has produced over 40 titles including the Divinity Series. In a previous life Swen was the lead software engineer on all of Larian Studios’ titles, but since 2007 his focus is the creative direction of the Larian team. His latest game is award winning Divinity: Original Sin 2. His ultimate ambition is to make the very big RPG that will dwarf them all and he is already working on his next huge RPG project!

Philomena Schwab

Stray Fawn Studio, Co-Fawnder & Game Designer

Philomena is a game designer from Zurich, Switzerland. She co-founded Stray Fawn Studio together with Micha Stettler. The indie game studio recently released its first game, Niche – a genetics survival game and is now developing its second game Nimbatus – The Space Drone Constructor. Philomena wrote her master thesis about community building for indie game developers and founded the nature gamedev collective Playful Oasis. As a chair member of the Swiss Game Developers association she helps her local game industry grow.

Brandon Sheffield

Necrosoft, Creative Director

Brandon Sheffield is creative director of Necrosoft Games, developer of Gunhouse, Gunsport, and Oh, Deer! He has worked on over a dozen titles as narrative director, designer, and biz dev/marketing/other nonsense. He writes a web comic called Hot Comic for Cool people, and also consults for a number of companies and conferences in advisory capacities. He likes weird old games, weird old music and weird old towns, so if you know anything about any of that, you should probably let him know.

Branislav Siles

Atomontage Inc., CEO / Co-Founder

Branislav had his first epiphanies about the inevitable volumetric future when he won 256-byte competitions in the European demoscene, two decades ago. He has since dedicated his career to developing volumetric graphics technologies that today show a glimpse of what’s possible and how we can only scale to the sci-fi visions of the OASIS, Metaverse, and the Matrix if these virtual worlds are simulated and rendered in a structurally simple, volumetrically sampled way.

Christian Fonnesbech

Nordisk, Head of IP Development

Christian Fonnesbech is an Executive Consultant at DDM. He is also Head of IP Development at Nordisk Film Games, which is the game investment arm of Egmont – a Nordic media conglomerate with 6.600 employees. His main focus is story and franchise development – building game IPs into lasting properties and brands.

Tsahi Liberman

Funnel, Head of Studio

Tsahi is an award winning educational games developer and designer, which spent the last 15 years in working with various TV brands and titles, and developing games for children. He is running the biggest game development and art program in Israel, at Tiltan School, and have been part of Games for Peace, an NPO that connects children in conflict zones around the world using games, which won the UN innovation prize at 2017. Last but not least, Tsahi is the Head of BD and Marketing for Simpool, a revolutionary platform to predict and optimize Game Economies and LTV, and is leading the Funnel entertainment studio in Haifa, working on Grime – an action RPG game influenced heavily by Dark Souls trilogy.

Mark Estdale

OM, Founder / Dialogue Director

Dialogue Director and Founder of OM London & Los Angeles
Mark Estdale is known for his work with developers and actors, casting and recording well over 10,000 characters for games. From The Witcher to Broken Sword, to Game of Thrones and Horizon Zero Dawn. When not in production Mark runs masterclasses on casting, pipelines and performance for developers and publishers, and for actors at three of the world’s leading drama schools. He’s also the tools and system designer behind Creative Dialogue Tools and the Game Immersive Voice Recording method (CDT & GIVR).

Nikola Nikita Jeremic 

Waveform Studio, Music Composer / Founder

Nikita is an avid hard-core gamer who turned out to be a skilled game composer as well, and is currently one of the young aspiring composers in the industry with over 5 years of experience in both AAA and Indie. His ever-expanding list of credits includes titles such as Destiny 2 and Destiny 2 Warmind, Warhammer 40k Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt official music album. Besides being a game composer, Nikita is also a skilled music sound designer creating various custom-made virtual instruments in order to make his sonic signature stand out from the crowd. When he is not composing, Nikita spends most of his time in PvP modes of Destiny 2, Quake and Halo 5.

Graham McAllister

UX Consultant

Graham helps developers improve their likelihood of success using two main approaches – by evaluating the UX of their game early and often throughout development, and by putting in place a ‘players-first’ development mindset. The majority of player experience issues can be identified and removed during development, but only if you have a process in place to do so. Previously he was founder of Player Research which was acquired by Keywords Studios, he now works as a freelance UX consultant.

Christopher Kassulke

HandyGames – THQ Nordic, CEO / Co-Founder

Christopher is CEO and co-founder of HandyGames a THQ Nordic family member and operates as an international publisher for small and mid-sized projects and developers for a worldwide audience on all game platforms (PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, VR and of course mobile). Christopher is responsible for international Biz-Dev and Sales within the organization for around two decades.

Kate Edwards

Geogrify, CEO / Principal Consultant

Kate Edwards is the CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify, a consultancy which pioneered content culturalization, and is the former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). In addition to being an outspoken advocate who serves in several advisory/board roles, she is a geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted on many game and non-game projects for BioWare, Google, Amazon, and many other companies. Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry in 2013 and in 2014 was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year. In 2018, she was honored with Reboot Develop’s annual Hero Award and also presented with IndieCade’s annual Game Changer Award. She is also profiled in the December 2018 publication Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play.

Vitor De Magalhaes

Improbable, Business Development

Vitor has been doing business development at Improbable for over 2 years. You’ll frequently find him flying to different shows, searching for developers looking to make new types of online experiences. Despite being obsessed with games his whole life, his path to the industry was an unconventional one. After completing a Masters in Japanese at Oxford, he went on to sell cloud services within finance before finally settling into the industry he was meant for all along. And he wouldn’t change it for the world.

Benjamin Mitchell

Imagination Technologies, Developer Support Engineer

Benjamin Mitchell is passionate about games and game development. He has experience in a wide range of games programming areas, and loves to learn more in his spare time too. As a Developer Support Engineer for PowerVR at Imagination Technologies, he enjoys a variety of tasks including developing tools, analysing graphics application performance, and helping external developers with their graphics problems. Outside of gaming, he is learning Mandarin, and has a keen interest in sports.

Mariusz Gąsiewski

Google, Head of Mobile Gaming and Apps Poland

Mariusz Gąsiewski has been with Google since 2007. He is now responsible for growth of mobile gaming ecosystem in Poland. During most of his career was helping some of Google’s biggest clients in Central and Eastern Europe in preparation and implementation of mobile measurement strategies. Lecturer at the most prestigious university in Poland, Warsaw School of Economics. He is a frequent speaker at gaming and mobile conferences and a founder of GameCamp, one of the biggest mobile gaming communities in Europe.

Dave Gilbert

Wadjet Eye Games, Creative Director / Founder

Dave has been interested in adventure games ever since 1986, when his mother made the mistake of buying him a copy of Infocom’s Wishbringer. Fifteen years later, he discovered the AGS engine and began making his own. In 2006, he decided that making games was too much fun to do anything else for a living, and formed Wadjet Eye Games to do just that. Wadjet Eye Games has developed a reputation for producing award-winning and critically acclaimed adventure game. The company’s award-winning portfolio includes The Shivah and the Blackwell series, Puzzle Bots, Gemini Rue and many others.

Elena Lobova

Achievers Hub, Founder

Elena Lobova is the founder of Achievers Hub, a platform that unites indie developers with investors, publishers, services and mentors from around the world. Elena has a track record for growing a game development outsourcing company iLogos from a small studio of 30 to 300+ employees international company as COO and then CEO, founding and organizing a game developers conference Get IT in Ukraine, consulting and helping various companies on business development.

Stefan Randelshofer

Ubisoft Blue Byte, Audio Director

Stefan has worked in the field of Audio and SoundDesign for TV and Movies since the end of the 90‘s. In the mid 00’s he started to work on games as Sound Designer and Audio Director – i.e. EA – Battleforge, Piranha Bytes – Risen 3, Ubisoft – The Settlers Kingdom of Anteria. He is a certified Fmod and Wwise User and teaches Soundscape Design for Games at the University of applied Sciences in Salzburg, at ETIC in Lisbon and at various SAE institutes in Germany. At the moment, he is the Audio Director at Ubisoft Blue Byte and is responsible for all products in the studio.

Michal Grno

Pixel Federation, Head of Marketing Analytics

After getting Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics and quitting job at a bank, Michal joined Pixel Federation in 2014 as a data analyst to support one of the smaller projects back then – Diggy’s Adventure. He mostly focused on improving monetization using custom segmentation strategies and later as part of the mobile launch team on improving player’s onboarding and ad monetization. Currently he’s working as Head of Marketing Analytics – bringing the right data insights for UA team, (soft and global) launching of new games, and last but not least, ad monetization.

Catalin Butnariu

Carbon / RGDA, CEO / President

As the President of the Romanian Game Developers Association, Catalin considers himself an advocate of the Romanian games industry and is a firm believer in the talent and potential of Eastern Europe in the world of games. He is a Co-Founder and General Manager of Carbon, a Bucharest-based games incubator and the Founder and CEO of Dev.Play, a game development conference focused on Eastern Europe. Prior to RGDA and his recent initiatives, he had spent a significant time at Gameloft, where he was managing a global division of over 1000 people.

Mikael Haveri

Housemarque, Head of Self-Publishing

Mikael is the Head of Self-Publishing at Housemarque. All the things outside of actual development still need to be done and he is the proper the man for that job. A good example of his daily grind can be seen in the Name of the Game movie, out now in the best digital theaters around the world.

Elle Osili-Wood

Host / Presenter

Elle Osili-Wood is a video gaming and entertainment presenter, and editor and presenter of PlayStation Access, the official channel of PlayStation UK. Having started her career as a political reporter for the BBC, she quickly gravitated toward her life long passion for video games, and has appeared on air to cover gaming for outlets including BBC Breakfast, BBC Click, Channel 4’s Gadget Man, Sky News and The Guardian.

Masatoshi Tokuoka

Writer / Game Journalist

As a game reviewer and games media journalist Tokuoka-san contributed a lot to 4Gamer.net (one of the largest online PC games media in Japan) for almost 10 years. Also he has been a columns writer for Command Magazine Japanese Ed. (table top wargame magazine). Recently, as a game journalist, he edited a book named Games Now. 17 writers with special skills and knowledges (like Mr. Sho Sato) contributed articles, to make a “text book for beginners”. It covers range of topic from game-economics to VR technology. As a game story writer, he participated in designing a main scenario for Sen-no-Kaizoku (SEGA).

Ante Vrdelja

Croteam, Chief Marketing Officer

Ante Vrdelja Croteam, Chief Marketing Officer Ante is developing marketing strategies and leading the execution of marketing programs at Croteam, Croatia’s powerhouse studio behind Serious Sam and The Talos Principle. As a co-founder and Secretary General of CGDA – Croatian Game Developers Association, he established a network of regional game dev studios and is working towards global recognition and local support for the growing industry. Una persona famosa. Muy importante.

Daniel Pearson

Purewal Consulting, Business Development Manager

Dan is a business development manager at Purewal Consulting, focused on taking the hard work out of opening new revenue streams for indie clients of all sizes by facilitating a broad range of projects such as merchandising, IP iteration, PR planning and brand building. He is always in search of high-quality, low-hassle solutions which let our partners concentrate on their core business. Dan is an ex-games industry business journalist – beginning his games career at Eurogamer before spending seven years at the industry’s leading publication, GamesIndustry.biz, leaving as a veteran European Editor in 2016.

Damir Durovic

Reboot, CEO

As a veteran of games industry with 22 years of combined experience in running huge games industry events, media and being key part on marketing and PR side of things Damir has seen empires fall and rise. For last 8 years together with an incredible and small but super agile team has been running REBOOT brand that besided running one of the biggest comsumer games shows in Europe, as well as the big European consumer games media is the company behind world famous Reboot Develop Blue and Red, two games industry conferences that have redefined the worldwide games industry event landscape. Damir was also recently elected to serve as an advisor on advisory board of European Game Developers Federation.

The amazing speaker lineup has been revealed in full