A work in progress – we have an excellent lineup of speakers this year

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.
Francis Fitzgerald Francis Fitzgerald has been independently developing games for a few years, ran a studio in Brisbane for one of them and is now working for Mighty Games in Melbourne. Throughout all this she has been managing both Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorder. In her spare time she works on her upcoming game about living life with Bipolar, likes to speak about Mental Health issues and destigmatisation and gives advice on how to manage illness and work. She hopes to make the world a more accepting place for those struggling with Mental Illness and help promote healthier work practices within the game dev community.
Matt Hall Matt Hall is half of Hipster Whale and runs a one-man-band studio in regional Victoria called KlickTock and has four App Store #1 games: Doodle Find, Little Things, Little Things Forever and Crossy Road.
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. their recent game, Hand of Fate, is a deck-building action-rpg for the downloadable market.
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.
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.
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
Andy Sum - Hipster Whale Andy Sum is half of Hipster Whale and runs a Melbourne based studio called Jigxor, where he created the PC title Dungeon Dashers. He also regularly participates in game jams, creating experimental games such as GAME OF THE YEAR: 420BLAZEIT.
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
Nicole Stark Nicole Stark is the very proud recipient of the inaugral MCVPacific WIG award for Creative Inspiration. She has held senior positions on a variety of shipped titles with project sizes ranging from triple A console to indie mobile. She's had her surfing animations praised by an Australian champion surfer and her Barbie costume designs praised by Mattel. She's passionate about encouraging more girls to make and play games and has organised workshops, panels and given talks in the UK, USA and Australia. In 2011 Nicole, her husband Jason and their four daughters moved Noosa and formed Disparity Games. Their first title, Run Fatty Run, reached number one in the Australian iOS charts, and is generally described as “weird but wonderful”. They’ve also released NTLanguages – Anindilyakwa, an award winning bilingual literacy tool produced in collaboration with the community linguists of Groote Eylandt. They're currently working on Ninja Pizza Girl, a game about bullying, self-esteem and parkour pizza delivery. It was successfully kickstarted last year and will be released later this year on far too many platforms, including Steam and all of the next gen consoles.
Sanatana Mishra Sanatana Mishra started on the competitive gaming circuit before making the leap to professional development. In his 5 years at Sega, Sanatana shipped two console titles, and worked on numerous prototypes before succumbing to the siren call of indie development and forming Witch Beam, where he currently handles design & production duties on Assault Android Cactus.