GO423 2014 – our wonderful speakers – a work in progress and apols to those speakers whose bios and pics have been ripped from linkedin.

#GO423 – twitter list

Check out the program and register for the event!

Joshua Boggs - Loveshack Entertainment Joshua Boggs is an independent game designer and developer, with a passion for experimental art and interactive narrative. He is currently leading design and development on the award-winning, narrative-based puzzle game, Framed. Previously, he worked at Firemint, EA, and Millipede where he helped develop a bunch of well-known games and franchises. Twitter: @JBoggsie
Jeff Brand - Bond University – Faculty of Society and Design & Digital Australia 2012 Dr. Brand is consultant to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, Australian Broadcasting Authority, SBS Corporation, Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia, Australian Communications and Media Authority and ENERGEX. He and his colleagues are responsible for the iGEA DA12 report on video games in Australia.
Alex Butterfield - Halfbrick Studios Over the last 10 years Alex Butterfield has worked at Ratbag, Computer Artworks, Kuju and Halfbrick, where his responsibilities now include leading the development of Fruit Ninja and overseeing the expansion of universes from the company’s most successful games. Twitter: @Halfbrick
Cieron Cody - Development Executive Screen Queensland Cieron Cody’s experience in creative development and project management spans more than nine years across the screen industry and community sector. His experience includes traditional and new media screen content. As the Development Manager for Screen Queensland, Cieron manages programs and initiatives designed to promote a vibrant Queensland screen industry.
Ramine Darabiha - Chief Invention Officer Halfbrick Studios Games have been a major part of Ramine's life since 1987. He specialises in mobile games and has a particular fondness for anything Japanese, retro or indie. He got into the industry by creating and contributing to gaming media and small indie games. Ramine's first startup was a cloud-based OS. The project was too ambitious, he thinks, but he did ship it and gained traction. It taught him how to design scalable, usable apps and services. At Rovio, Ramine helped build the services team and then the R&D team. They built new game features on a variety of platforms at a large scale.
Christy Dena - Universe Creation 101 & SAE QANTM Christy Dena is a writer-designer-director who has worked on award-winning pervasive games, film, digital and theatre projects. Clients include Nokia, Cisco/No Mimes Media, ABC, Wieden+Kennedy, and many more. She is Professor Adjunct at Creative Industries, QUT; Game Design Lecturer at SAE Brisbane; a Member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmys); and a Board Member of the Entertainment Technology Press (ETC). Her web audio adventure AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS has been nominated for the 'Digital Narrative' category of the 2014 WA Premier's Book Awards, and the 'Best Writing in a Game' for the Freeplay Independent Games Festival Awards. She was granted the first 'Digital Writing Residency' The Cube, QUT. Her street games have been featured at pervasive gaming festivals, and she runs a lab for storytellers working in tech in NYC.
Matt Ditton - Founder at Many Monkeys Dev Matt is a Producer and Technical Artist. He has got a strong focus on Programming as an Art form. And he believes that by creating the best team you can create the best games. Matt's Specialties include production pipelines, creation and maintenance. Fixing problems. Making games happen and programming as a Visual Art.
Mick Dobele - Executive Producer Halfbrick Studios Michael has been in the Australian games industry for 10 years now with most of that time in a lead position at Halfbrick Studios. He’s seen firsthand the rises, falls and evolution of the Australian Games industry into what it is today. Twitter: @Halfbrick
Sean Edwards - Director of Development - Lucid VR Sean is the Director and Co Founder of Lucid VR which is based in Brisbane & focused exclusively on VR games development. With more than 13 years in the games industry he is a respected professional and recognized as the creator of the world’s first fully complete made for VR title, Lunar Flight. Twitter: @sh0v0r
George Fidler - General Manager KIXEYE Australia George Fidler has been in the interactive entertainment industry since 1989. After spending more than 10 years at Electronic Arts as the Chief Operating Officer of product development in Asia Pacific, George established The Creative Assembly Brisbane Studio. This studio developed a number of award winning strategy games, including Rome: Total War and Medieval II: Total War. Currently George is General Manager of KIXEYE Australia, a 40 person studio in Fortitude Valley developing the Massively Multiplayer On-line Realtime Strategy Game (MMO-RTS) called VEGA Conflict. George holds a B. Economics and started his working career in chartered accounting with KPMG, before moving out in to industry.
Zac Fitz-Walter - Queensland University of Technology GRID Zac is an associate lecturer at the Games Research and Interaction Design Lab (GRID Lab) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His research focuses on exploring the use of game elements in non-game contexts (aka gamification). He also develops iOS apps and plays way too many boardgames. Twitter: @zefcan
Dan Graf - Team Lead Halfbrick Sydney & Sydney IGDA Dan began animation and game design at age 10, pixel-painting videogame characters and designing levels on ye olde Commodore 64. He began his career in the film industry as a Character Artist, Animator and eventually worked in Story Unit pre-production on projects including Max Max: Fury Road. During this time he learned to focus on high-quality, rapid-iteration creative production, always hoping to apply these skills to his true passion - game design. Dan was hired when Halfbrick opened a Sydney office and recently promoted to Team Lead. He has spoken at Freeplay and GCAP on the topic of Story-Driven Game Design, and in his spare time in 2008 he founded the IGDA Sydney chapter - a local game development community now with monthly events of 100+ attendees, and growing. Twitter: @DanGraf
Kylie Hickling - Dept of Science, IT, Innovation and the Arts (DSITIA) Kylie Hickling is Director Commercialisation Services, Department of Science, IT, Innovation and the Arts. Kylie leads a small team of dedicated individuals focused on increasing the number and success rate of startups in Queensland. She has held various strategic marketing roles in Queensland Government including stints with Liquor Licensing and Disability Services which drew on her strong community engagement skills. Prior to joining government, Kylie was a senior member of Gartner Group (Australasia), with responsibility for delivering Gartner events across Australia and Asia Pacific, including the prestigious Gartner Symposium. Twitter: @KylieHickling
Morgan Jaffit - Director Defiant Development Morgan Jaffit helps make games happen! Defiant Development is a boutique game development studio located in Brisbane Australia, with a focus on developing high quality games for mobile and emerging platforms. Publishers of Ski Safari, Developers of Heroes Call and Ben 10 Slammers. they are currently working on Hand of Fate, a deck-building action-rpg for the downloadable market and a top-secret project with a fantastic partner.
Lisy Kane - Digital Advertising Coordinator, Pozible Lisy Kane graduated from QUT in 2013 and shortly after moved to Melbourne to start her career in the creative industries. She currently works as a digital advertising coordinator at crowd-funding company, Pozible but continues to advocate for the gaming and technology industries with her startup, Girl Geek Academy. Twitter: @lisyk
Friedrich Kirschner - Zietbrand DE Friedrich Kirschner is a filmmaker, visual artist and software developer. He hacks game engines for breakfast in order to make extraordinary machinima and he turns soft toys into interactive playable things. Friedrich messes with they way we think about game ideation, design and making.
Zachary Lieberman Zachary is a co-creator of openFrameworks and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation, a school he helped co-found in New York examining the use and misuse of technology in the arts. He is also the first artist-in-residence for the TRANSMIT3 Residency at The Cube. Zachary's work uses technology in a playful way to break down the fragile boundary between the visible and the invisible. He has held residencies at Ars Electronica Futurelab, Eyebeam, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Hangar Center for the Arts in Barcelona, and his chief goal is to create and help others create strange, impractical and magical projects that help bring play and surprise to the everyday.
Kieran Lord - Cratesmith & Right Pedal Studios Mentor Kieran Lord aka Cratesmith is the Unity3d mentor at Right pedal studios. He is lead programmer at Strange Loop Games, Unity Asset Store plugin developer and Devout consumer of fine coffee.
Gordon Moyes - Griffith University & Curious Bear Productions Currently leading the Bachelor of Games Design for Griffith University, Gordon Moyes has over 15 years of local and international experience in the computer and video game industry. Gordon has played key roles on some of Australia’s most successful AAA game productions. Having produced Pandemic’s million selling Destroy All Humans! and its 2006 sequel Destroy All Humans! 2: Make War Not Love, his career began with the coding of the graphics engine for Auran’s multi-award winning Dark Reign.
Tom Murphy - HR Manager Halfbrick Studios Twitter: @Halfbrick
Alex Norton - Visual Outbreak Alex Norton is the Creative Director on an expansive video game project, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, leading a team of 45 people from around the world to produce a cutting-edge game with new technology previously unseen in the industry.
John Passfield - Right Pedal Studios John made Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage, Flight of the Amazon Queen and co-created Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. He also founded a number of Australian game studios including Krome Studios. John runs Australia's first game accelerator, Right Pedal Studios, and makes games like Brainiversity and Save Our Village when he has time. Twitter: @johnpassfield
Antony Reed - Chief Executive Officer, Game Developers’ Association of Australia Antony Reed is the CEO of the Game Developers’ Association of Australia and a 23-year veteran of the interactive entertainment industry. With global experience in game development and publishing, Antony has been the marketing mind behind many of the world’s biggest games franchises and has won numerous awards for his campaigns. Today, as the leader of Australia’s peak industry body, Antony advocates the interests of the sector to government, educational, financial and commercial institutions as well as enthusiastically promoting the industry internationally. Twitter: @gdaa_oz
Dan Vogt - Right Pedal Studios Mentor Dan is a designer with an artistic bent and a passion for challenging, creative projects. He's fascinated by how humans work, great design and exploring how the two overlap. Dan co-founded Halfbrick, and in his 10 years there, helped grow it from 2 to 50 Bricks, ship 20+ games and adapt to profound market change. Dan now spends his time mentoring and making his own (wacky) games. Twitter: @dan_vogt
Chris Wright - Managing Director Surprise Attack Chris is the founder and managing director of Surprise Attack Games and Surprise Attack Consulting. He has 15 years experience in marketing, 10 of that in the video games industry, He's worked in AAA and indie games and launched literally hundreds of games from huge titles such as Saints Row to tiny mobile games Twitter: @Supattack