Jill Duffy is senior editor at ACM, working on publications such as eLearn Magazine, Crossroads (the student magazine of the ACM), Ubiquity, and Computers in Entertainment. She spent five years as a writer and editor in games, covering the business and development side of the industry. Her work has appeared in The San Francisco Examiner newspaper, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, DigitalTrends, and several blogs about popular culture.
Tronster has worked in various business sectors as a Software Architect, the past decade, with the games industry being his primary focus since 2006. A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in Computer Science, Tronster has a few titles under his belt while working at Breakaway Games and by his own Flash games company Geek House Games. Tronster was one of the four founding members of the Baltimore IGDA and currently serving his second year on the board as the chapter’s chair. Despite his busy schedule, he still finds time to teach 2 nights a week for UMBC’s Interactive Art class. A gamer to the core and Tron fanatic, Tronster’s off-time is usually occupied with learning new programming techniques and technologies, playing Ultimate Frisbee, and writing house techno tracks.
Daniel is a seasoned executive with over 15 years experience successfully leading diverse teams in the creation of cutting edge applications for large technology projects in the commercial and governmental sectors. Currently, Daniel leads the Serious Games division for IPKeys Technologies - a federal contractor located in the Jersey Shore area. Their latest product, I-GAME, was created for the US Department of Defense to allow subject matter experts without programming expertise to rapidly author interactive, physically-based, 3D environments for testing, analysis and training.
Tristin is a Project Manager for the Games and Media Expo. Before joining the GameX team, she spent two years at Comcast Interactive Media as a Producer / Product Manager where she helped relaunch and rebrand Chill, Comcast.net's casual games destination. Prior to that, she spent three years at Comcast Corporation as a Support Analyst, providing national support guidance for all channels of business for Comcast High-Speed Internet, in addition to acting as the main point of contact for over 10,000 employees and 20 call centers nationwide. Tristin is a member of the International Game Developers Association and the Academy for Interactive Arts & Sciences.
Alex Horn is the co-founder and lead designer of The X Points Games Studio, an independent studio based in Philadelphia, Pa where he is also a content and video specialist for Comcast Interactive Media (CIM). Alex serves as chapter coordinator for the Philadelphia chapter of the IGDA and is a member of the Game Writers SIG. He has produced original, linear and interactive content for CIM including video, news, and interviews covering everything from Epic Games to the New York Comic Con. A Philly native, Alex graduated from Temple University, and played semi-professional soccer in South America.
Steve Horowitz is a diverse and prolific musician, and creator of odd but highly accessible sounds with an output spanning the worlds of film, television, games, concerts, and recordings. As a Grammy, Webby & BDA award winner, Horowitz's work includes music and production services for some of today's top video game, film, television, and new media companies including Nickelodeon Digital, Worldwide Biggies, MTV, Spike TV, The Con, Warrior-Poets, SEGA, Sony, PF Magic, Rocket Science Games, & Living Books, just to name a few. In addition to his ground breaking work with Nickelodeon Digital and his film and television scores (
Super Size Me, Casino Cinema, I Bet You Will, Nickelodeon), he also records and tours with his band The Code International. Steve won a Grammy award for engineering the multi-artist
True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe [Sugar Hill], 1996's winner for best bluegrass album. Steve studied composition at the California Institute and has received performance underwriting and commissions from numerous organizations.
Darius runs Orbus Gameworks, a company that's building gameplay data metrics tools to help developers keep track of what their players are doing in-game. Before Orbus, Darius did gameplay metrics at Turbine Inc for MMORPGs including
Dungeons & Dragons Online and
Lord of the Rings Online. He is also a technology officer for the IGDA Education SIG, a committee member for the Boston Postmortem, and spends a good deal of his free time giving advice on how to break into the game industry.
Coray Seifert is a game designer at THQ's Kaos Studios, creators of
Frontlines: Fuel of War. The youngest ever member of the International Game Developers Association's Board of Directors, he has also served as the principal coordinator of the IGDA's New Jersey chapter since 2002 and helped to found the Game Design Special Interest Group in 2008. Coray has developed games as a designer, writer, and producer for companies like Large Animal Games, Blade Edge Software, and the US Department of Defense. He has also appeared on Gamasutra.com, Forbes.com, The NY1 News Channel, in Game Developer Magazine, at the Game Developers Conference and at numerous other game industry events as an editor, panelist, lecturer, or host. An advocate for the aspiring game developer, Coray teaches game design at Bloomfield College and The Stevens Institute of Technology.
Drew Sikora has been active in the games industry since 2001, when he co-founded the NJ North IGDA chapter. He’s been involved with GameDev.net since 2000, becoming Executive Producer in 2006 and working hard with his team of awesome people to make GameDev.net a valuable resource for game developers of all trades. He’s also worked with Game Institute since its conception in 2001, supporting the community, managing live seminars by experienced industry members and judging the institute’s regular game programming challenges. In whatever spare time he has he likes to program small game projects whenever he gets the urge.
Tina Tyndal is a marketing strategist with over 10 years of experience in marketing, pr and advertising, diagnosing brand challenges and delivering innovative marketing strategies to drive growth of Fortune 100 technology brands, Fortune 500 pharmaceuticals and leading national non-profits.
An avid gamer, Tina can be found playing video games for "market research" and follows the latest industry trends in her spare time. Currently she consults with video game companies to create high performance marketing and PR campaigns and provides tools and information to better understand the consumer, enabling teams to better development games. Tina is also active in the International Game Developers Association acting as the IGDA Women in Games Newsletter Editor and Baltimore Chapter Content Manager. Additionally, she writes for Total Gaming Network and Girl Gamer.
Wade has been designing and developing games since 1996. He founded Large Animal Games with Josh Welber in January of 2001. He was the founding editor of the Casual Games Quarterly and has led the New York City Chapter of the International Game Developers Association since 2006. After spending five years in the casual downloadable games market, Large Animal is now focused entirely on publishing games that connect friends, on networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Twitter, as well as on mobile devices such as the iPhone. Their Toga platform enables the deployment of games and the management of a virtual goods economy across all of these distribution channels. Recent titles include Bumper Stars, Bananagrams, Lucky Strike Lanes, and Twivial. For more information, and to try out some of their games, please visit their website.
Brandon Van Slyke is a professional video game designer with experience designing commercial console games, mobile games, and casual downloadable web games, including Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island which was nominated for an Independent Games Festival Award in 2008. In addition to his work in game design, Brandon has also written feature articles for GameCareerGuide.com and Game Developer Magazine and is the Editor-in-Chief of nycgameindustry.com, the central online repository and informational hub for New York’s growing game development community. Involved in the industry since 2002, Brandon is an active outspoken member of the IGDA and a lifelong game enthusiast. He currently works as a game designer at Vicarious Visions (an Activision studio) in New York.
Mike Worth is an Emmy-award winning composer and orchestrator, who writes and orchestrates music for television animation and video games. With one foot in network television, and one foot in high-end video games, Mike merges the catchy excitement of outstanding game music with the narrative drama of great television music. Mike has written original music for feature films such as Rush Hour 3, and Ivory. In television, Mike has written music for MTV, VH-1, and Comedy Central, and has received an Emmy award for orchestrations and MIDI orchestrations for Nickelodeon's The Wonder Pets. Mike's video game credits include music for the upcoming sci-fi MMO, Divergence: Online, sound design for the XNA title Fittest, and music and sound effects for the iPhone game, Lock N' Roll. Mike is also one of the founders of VGI Philadelphia, an organization dedicated to promoting, growing, and supporting the professional video game industry in Philadelphia. He is the chair of the IGDA Audio SIG and is active with the IASIG and GANG.
