Helen Andrzejowska
Co-Founder
Ocean Spark Studios

Helen is a co-founder of Ocean Spark Studios, an award winning Video game development studio from Huddersfield. Helen founded the studio with the aim of increasing the amount of women working within the industry, as she truly believes a balanced workforce is a better workforce. Alongside managing the day-to-day running of the studio, Helen is also a 3D Environment Artist and has produced content for many video games.

Anna Hollinrake
Art Director
Karrot Animation

Anna is an award winning art director, illustrator and BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in games and animation. She has worked in games on much loved IPs such as Adventure Time and Magic: The Gathering, as well as helping craft visuals on indie projects such as Lola and the Giant and Arca’s Path VR. She is currently art directing a new 2D animated show for the BBC. In her personal work she loves to build fantastical, brightly coloured worlds filled with light and life, as well as advocating for inclusivity and greater awareness of mental health issues.

Shivani Lamba
Founder
Brightlobe

Shivani Lamba is a creative technologist and the founder of Brightlobe, a VC-backed game studio and children’s health startup.

Matt Pelly
Head of Development Support
Hutch

I joined the games industry back in 2006 as a tester on a 3 month contract at EA Games. 14 years later, I am still here and have been fortunate to gain experience working on console, Facebook, and now mobile games.  A large chunk of that time was spent working within QA for a number of studios at EA including Bright Light, Playfish, Criterion and DICE.  Over the past 7 years I have been at Hutch where I was charged with building the QA and CS departments and scaling them alongside the needs of the company and our growing slate of games.  Most recently I have transitioned to more of an operations role and am now Head of Development Support which encompasses QA, CS, localisation, the tools and technology development team, and maintenance of our legacy titles.

Bill Donegan
Projects Manager
SpecialEffect

Bill is Projects Manager at SpecialEffect, a charity who help people to access video games, when using a standard game controller is physically difficult or even impossible. Being part of the SpecialEffect team for over 10 years, his work has included working directly with individuals to create customised controllers, to aiding developers with making their game or hardware more accessible. Currently his work includes assisting the development team with a new project, creating a website of free to play eye gaze games, which can be played using eye movement alone.

Haley Uyrus
Head of Brand Communications
Tonic Games Group & Mediatonic

Haley currently looks after the marketing at Tonic Games Group and Mediatonic (Hatoful Boyfriend, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Murder by Numbers) across their four studios in London, Brighton, Leamington Spa and Madrid. Previously she’s worked on over 35 indie titles at a boutique games PR agency, and as an in-house marketing manager on Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea and Fallen London at Failbetter Games. Haley also is a proud Limit Break and NYU Games Incubator mentor, Game Dev Heroes award winner and is a co-founder of the UK Games Marketer London meetup.

twitter.com/absintheuse
uyrus.com

Meg Jayanth
Writer & Narrative Designer

Meg Jayanth was lead writer on 80 Days, inkle Studio’s anti-colonial retro-futurist retelling of Verne’s classic novel – winner of the IGF Narrative award and named TIME’s Game of the Year 2014. She won a Writer’s Guild of Great Britain award in 2015 for her work on 80 Days, and a Writer’s Guild of America award in 2018 as part of Horizon: Zero Dawn’s writing team. She recently contributed work to Sunless Skies, Falcon Age, and the upcoming Boyfriend Dungeon, and led Storyscape’s Titanic writing team. She is currently lead writer on Shedworks’ evocative coming-of-age tale Sable.

Jess Gaskell
Executive Producer
Sumo Digital Sheffield

Currently working at Sumo Digital in her adopted home of Sheffield. Jess has spent the last few years working on the Hitman IP, earning the role of Executive Producer on a currently undisclosed title. Outside of her project commitments, Jess continues to demonstrate a clear passion for encouraging inclusion and engagement with the games industry. Over the past 12 months she has played a key role in establishing Sumo’s Make the Grade school outreach programme and its upcoming cross company female employee mentoring scheme.

John Campbell
Technical Director
Triangular Pixels

John Campbell is the Technical Director of award-winning studio Triangular Pixels and BAFTA Breakthrough Brit for 2019. In games development since 2004, and VR/AR since 2012, John has had experience on a variety of PlayStation hardware and VR devices, and works at the bleeding edge new platforms solving the tough technical challenges VR brings. With a background in gameplay, systems and networking he specialises in new user experiences and interactions.

John is currently working on Unseen Diplomacy 2, a VR game using non-euclidian geometry.

triangularpixels.com
unseendiplomacy2.com
https://twitter.com/OrangyTang

Lesleyann White
Principal QA Specialist
Failbetter Games

Lesleyann is an award-winning quality analyst at Failbetter Games and a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit for 2019.

She has worked in games since 2012 on popular RPGs such as RuneScape, Fallen London, Sunless Sea, and its critically-acclaimed sequel, Sunless Skies. Having also worked as a software tester outside of the games industry, she’s an advocate for better working conditions for games QA, and is keen to raise the profile of the vital work they do within the industry.

https://twitter.com/Fuzzlette

Sam Hughes
Audio Designer, Remedy Entertainment
Founder, The Sound Architect

I’m Sam, a sound designer and voice actor currently working as Audio Designer at Remedy Entertainment.

I’ve always loved video games and their audio since a young age, so to be a part of this industry is amazing to me.

A few years ago I founded both my website, The Sound Architect, and Game Audio North, an event for people in the North of England to meet up with other audio professionals of all levels and learn from/teach each other.

I was overwhelmed to win the Game Dev Hero for Sound previously, it’s one of my happiest moments, so I am very honoured to be on the judging panel for this year’s awards.

Thad Frogley
Director of Engineering
Boss Alien

Emma Turner
Head of HR
Outplay Entertainment

With over 15 years’ experience in the games industry, Emma leads in all areas of talent management at Outplay. Over the last 9 years, she has helped Outplay Entertainment transform into the UK’s largest independent mobile gaming studio, developing a creative and progressive culture for the studio to thrive within and assembled a  large and diverse team of the industry’s top talent.

Adam Campbell
Managing Games
Azoomee

Managing Games at Azoomee, Vice Chair at BAME in Games and member of BAFTA, Adam is an industry pro with a career spanning nearly a decade.

Tamsin O’Luanaigh
Co Sec & Talent Director
nDreams

Tamsin O’Luanaigh is co-founder and Talent Director of nDreams, an award-winning virtual reality studio, dedicated to high-end games and experiences.

With a strong background in running support teams for tech companies, Tamsin (alongside Patrick O’Luanaigh) set up nDreams in 2006. Together they have grown the company in to one of the world’s leading VR specialists with over 70 full-time studio staff. Tamsin oversees a number of areas of the business including Company Secretarial; HR; Recruitment and Operations, her focus is firmly on the people, process and culture of the company.

As a passionate champion for diversity and inclusivity on a wider industry scale, Tamsin was recently named as one of GI.biz 100 Women in Games and is involved with G into Gaming (winning their inaugural Diversity Award in 2018).

She is also a proud mum of two, a Limit Break Mentor, a Trustee of Into Games and an Ambassador for Autistica Play.

Marie Dealessandri

Senior Staff Writer

MCV

Seth Barton

Editor

MCV

Nick Baynes

General Manager

Hangar 13

Nick is General Manager of Hangar 13’s Brighton office, a global AAA console developer with offices in the UK, California and the Czech Republic. Over a 27 year career he has designed, produced and directed a large number of games across genres and platforms, as well as spending 6 years running indie studios before joining Hangar 13.

Harinder Sangha
Operations Director
Sumo Digital Leamington

Nick Duncombe
Head of Recruitment
Playground Games

Nick Duncombe leads the Recruitment function at Playground Games, an XBOX Game Studio and one of the UK’s most pre-eminent AAA developers. Nick joined Playground in 2015 during the development of Forza Horizon 3 and has helped the studio grow to over 250 employees.

Since joining Playground Games Nick has been responsible for hiring the best video game developers from around the world and most recently the recruitment drive for Playground Games second AAA studio who are developing Fable, a new beginning for the legendary franchise

Ed Perkins
Director of Mobile Publishing
Square Enix

I’ve been in the games industry for over ten years now, having worked on AAA console, web and mobile on both the development and publishing sides.  I currently head up mobile publishing for Square Enix, and alongside building a new team and games I’ve been pushing hard on diversity, charity and wellbeing initiatives externally and internally, starting Pride support at the company three years ago.

Ian Goodall
Managing Director
Aardvark Swift

Ian entered the industry as a consultant for Aardvark Swift at the turn of the century and hasn’t looked back since. Since becoming Managing Director in 2010, Ian has revamped Aardvark Swift into the award-winning, industry leading video game recruitment agency that it is today.

With a passion for developing the UK’s graduate talent, Ian founded the Grads in Games initiative which aims to strengthen links between academia and industry. The initiative’s Search for a Star challenges recently hosted over 1000 students who signed up to develop games and game-ready assets, alongside over 30 studios who signed up to support the initiative.

Emma Smith

Head of Talent

Creative Assembly

Account Manager
Games Jobs Direct