Scott Brodie is the Founder and Creative Director at Heart Shaped Games, creators of We Are The Caretakers, IndieCade finalist Hero Generations, Brave Hand, and other original strategy games in development. Scott has been designing games for 19 years, including work at Microsoft Game Studios, where he worked with talented independent Xbox Live Arcade developers on games like Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Scrap Metal, and Aegis Wing.

Daniel Cook is a veteran game designer who runs the popular game design website Lostgarden.com. He writes extensively on the techniques, theory and business of game design. He is the cofounder and Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox. In his misspent youth, he was a professional illustrator and has a degree in physics and an MBA. His innovative game designs range from puzzle to action to MMOs. Notable titles include Triple Town, Steambirds, Tyrian, Road Not Taken, Beartopia and Alphabear. He’s recently shipped Cozy Grove, a life-sim involving a dutiful scout who helps ghosts.

Limpho Moeti previously worked at Free Lives (Broforce, Gorn) and was deputy festival director of South Africa’s playful media festival, Playtopia. Currently she works as a producer/biz dev at Nyamakop developing African-inspired video games. In her spare time she thinks of ways to smash the patriarchy, topple capitalism and who was the best movie Batman. She is definitely not a robot sent from the future to destroy human but her boss did call her the nuclear bomb of bizdev.

Director and Co-Writer of We Are OFK, partnered with media investment fund Kowloon Nights. Teddy co-designed award-winning RPG Hyper Light Drifter across Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Apple and PC platforms. Former Creative Director at Square Enix Montréal, designer at Disney and game narrative researcher at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Co-founder of Los Angeles arts collective Glitch City – a hub for the indie games community. Teddy hosted and produced events such as the Chocobowl charity livestream, IndieCade Innovation Awards, and Idle Thumbs Playscape podcast. Their work explores narrative systems, love, and creative life on the internet.

Indie Game developer, founder of Slashware Interactive. Santiago (also known as Slash/Slashie) has led the development of several videogames including NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén, an open-world exploration RPG taking place in the XVI century and focused on the Muisca culture, and Ananias Roguelike, a multiplatform traditional dungeon crawler. He also provides services to Casual Games companies in North America.

Santiago focuses on procedural content generation, and is a known figure in the Roguelike games scenes, having founded the Temple of the Roguelike community, the Roguebasin wiki, and being a regular participant in the 7DRL challenge, where he has produced 17 entries. He has also been a speaker three times in the Roguelike Celebration event in San Francisco.

If there’s a phrase to describe me it would be “Sheer Willpower”. I have never enjoyed nor accepted being told I can’t do something, on 2011 I decided I wanted to pursue my dream of game development and the first step for was to create a game industry in Costa Rica that was accesible, diverse and encouraging. I founded the local IGDA chapter, reignited the global game jam movement and engaged the national government to start taking us into account as a real,growing industry..

On 2013 it was time to start my own adventure and Headless Chicken Games was born, a game studio that would be the place for those that got told “you can’t make games”. We take “diamond in the rough” developers and polish them into world class game developers. At Headless Chicken Games, I take every talent and make sure that they have room to grow, while also putting attention to the smallest details in every project (I get involved in EVERY project that reachces Headless Chicken Games).

I make sure that things happen, every project that has been trusted to us, becomes a reality because we focus on quality, communication and iteration on client satisfaction.

Mohammad Fahmi is an indie game developer, consultant and freelance writer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. He was the chief editor of a local Indonesian game media, Tech in Asia, and was the director of Coffee Talk and What Comes After. He’s currently working on other games while trying to help other indies in Indonesia.

Francesca Esquenazi is a Co-Founder, CEO and Producer at Future Club. Francesca is currently helping run the operations of the company and manage various projects. Francesca has worked on League of Legends, Indivisible and Skullgirls and has made props for Key & Peel, Betas and other unreleased TV pilots. Francesca started playing games on her Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis as a child in the 90’s and started developing games in 2010.

Francesca graduated from Santa Monica College’s Academy of Entertainment Technology with a degree in Animation. Francesca also enjoys creating cosplay outfits, watercolor painting, karaoke and dancing with her wife and twin boys. You can follow Francesca at www.twitter.com/frani_e

Ashley Alicea is a Senior Developer Advocate for Games at Unity. She spends her days creating technical talks and demos to empower Unity creators with the skills they need to make games and interactive media. You’ll find her at conferences, game jams, and hackathons digging deep into new Unity features and getting excited about the community’s latest creations. Her past roles at Global Game Jam, IndieCade, and Games For Change have made her a passionate advocate of democratizing game development – a mission she proudly continues at Unity.

Charley has over 20 years of game development experience in design, production, and creative management. As the co-founder of Hidden Variable Studios, Charley led the design and direction for their debut iOS/Android title Bag It! and Tic Tactics. Charley is currently the Lead Designer and Game Director for Skullgirls Mobile.

I have 15 years of experience in game development and in the last 6 years I have been working as a producer, leading smart teams that developed several original VR/AR titles, strengthening IP’s, work for hire, proof of concepts and prototypes in diversified projects for companies like PlayStation VR, Disney, Marvel, Lenovo, HTC Vive, Samsung, Oculus, Google, Cartoon Network and many others.

I’m currently working at Cloudhead Games, developers of The Gallery Series and the smash hit: Pistol Whip.

Sherveen is an award winning designer and producer based in Riverside, California. He was the Lead Producer of award winning Puzzle Platformer From Light, and Lead Mission Designer on We Are the Caretakers, an afrofuturist game about saving endangered animals from Aliens. His latest project is Midautumn, a supernatural game about blasting evil spirits, Asian diaspora culture and resisting gentrification. Midautumn is currently in the final week of its successful Kickstarter campaign, you can pledge to and share the campaign at bit.ly/midautumnKS.

Benjamin Tarsa is an 8-year industry veteran with experience on both the media and publishing sides of gaming. Previously serving as the lead for community and content for gaming wikis at Gamepedia and later Fandom, Benjamin has a wealth of experience working with game developers of all sizes from AAA to single-person teams and assisting them with creating and growing community resources to support their titles.

After seven years working with gaming wikis, Benjamin moved into game publishing by joining Freedom Games, a publishing outfit founded by two of his former colleagues at Curse/Fandom. As Director of Publishing, his team helps developers make their dreams into reality by managing the twists and turns of bringing a game to the market.

Benjamin has been involved with IndieCade for many years, as a sponsor, partner, speaker, as well as a being a member of the Alumni Board.