IXC Panelists

Chella Ramanan
Former games journalist, Chella Ramanan is the co-founder of 3-Fold Games, the studio behind the BAFTA-nominated indie game ‘Before I Forget’ and narrative director on Windrush Tales. She is currently a narrative designer at Ubisoft Massive, in Malmo, Sweden.
Throughout her career, Chella continues to be committed to telling stories that elevate marginalised perspectives and challenge the accepted default. She is also co-founder of POC in Play, an organisation dedicated to the inclusion and representation of people of colour in the videogames industry. Her achievements include Gameindustry.biz 100, Evening Standard Influential Londoner, BAFTA Breakthrough and GDA Future Class.

Jeanette Bushnell, PhD
Anishinaabe. Citizen of Turtle Mountain. Retired from teaching indigenous philosophy at University of Washington.

Jonathan Tomhave, PhD
Hidatsa, MHA Nation. Developer and Facilitation Specialist – Alliance for Professional Development and Caregiver Excellence at the University of Washington.

Lauren Scott
Lauren is a designer who has worked on both large titles such as Psychonauts 2 and Mafia III, as well as smaller projects like academic research games and R&D within larger companies.

MJ Johns
MJ is a professor at the University of Texas in the Computer Science department, and also an indie game developer and founder of Astire Games. Mj has over a decade of experience in the games industry including work in AAA on Call of Duty and Mafia III, as well as Virtual Reality, mobile, PC, and web games.

Richard Lemarchand
Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, professor, writer, and consultant. He worked at Naughty Dog where he was a lead game designer on the Uncharted series, he helped to create the game series Gex and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics, and he now teaches full-time in the USC Games program at the University of Southern California.
IndieXchange was created in 2011 by Jane Pinckard with the goal of facilitating meetings between game developers and publishers or platform holders who would be interested in their games. It has always been open and free to anyone who submitted a game to the IndieCade festival. Jeremy Gibson Bond took over the reins in 2013 and continued to develop it as not only a day to network with publishers but also a time and space for developers to meet each other and share both best practices and half-finished games. Chairs of IndieXchange over the years have included Juan Gril, Chris DeLeon, Kellee Divine (Game Tasting), Karin Ray (Publisher Meetings), and now Erin Reynolds.
Throughout its development, IndieXchange has included practical talks on a variety of topics that are of interest to IndieCade developers. Our goal is to help developers who have successfully finished a game level-up their development processes to help build more sustainable businesses, so topics often include business, marketing, and legal sessions. Though it wasn’t possible to include the Game Tasting and Publisher Meetings in 2020s online IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere, we did continue our successful talks and had some of the best sessions of 2020, featuring panelists who called in from around the world.
Building on the success of IndieXchange 2020, we’ve decided to keep IndieXchange online for the foreseeable future, but now instead of one day, once a year, we’re planning to have IndieXchange weekends. Each day will include three sessions (one each for Impact, Business, and Individual issues) and a time slot for several breakout rooms. Future IndieXchange weekends will also be themed, allowing us to feature different content throughout the year while sticking to our three pillars. If you have ideas for future sessions or speakers that you’d love to hear from, please let us know by filling out the form at: https://form.jotform.com/211105931390042
Meet the organizers

Jeremy Gibson Bond
I first showed my game Coalesce at the IndieCade 2013 E3 showcase, where it was featured in the Kotaku story. Shortly thereafter, I was asked to join IndieCade as the Chair of Education and Advancement. In 2013, I chaired both IndieXchange and GameU alone, and in 2014, I brought in Juan Gril and Chris DeLeon to help me. Since then, I’ve chaired IXC every year except for 2018, when my son was born. I also showed Ranamor, a getting-to-know-you game about frog love on cell phones at IndieCade Night Games in 2014 or 2015.

Juan Gril
Juan Gril is a game designer, and augmented reality developer. Over the past 4 years, Juan has worked in Augmented Reality applications, experiences, and games. Juan has more than 20 years of experience developing interactive software and games.
For the past 2 decades, Juan has been involved in the design and production of mass market games. In the late 90s Juan was one of the original members Yahoo! Games (the first and most popular gaming web site in the early years of the Internet). From Yahoo! he went to found Joju Games, a successful casual games studio which over 12 years developed more than 50 games for PC, console, and mobile platforms, for big media companies and game publishers.
In addition to his work for IndieCade, Juan is a judge for the “Sense of Wonder Night” Game Festival at Tokyo Game Show since 2012.

Michelle Pun
Michelle Pun is a game designer and producer with 15+ years’ ambidextrous experience leading game design and production in startup & global studio environments. Her past work includes leadership roles at Disney & Zynga. Since 2016, Michelle has been at Osmo to help create hands-on learning games that combine real-world tangibles with digital play. Michelle is driven by the idea that her products can make someone’s life a little better in some small way, and is dedicated to bringing quality, healthy entertainment into the world.