2022 Speakers

I am a PhD student in PCG at Northeastern University. My research is on coming up with tools to make it easier for non-PCG experts to come up or alter content generators. My work has thus far been Bayesian-based with an emphasis on combining designer specification of the generator and learning from data.

Adam Newgas, better known as Boris the Brave, is a hobbyist PCG tools developer and educator. Too lazy to make games himself, instead, he supplies tutorials, research and musings on generation on his blog. You can find his tools on GitHub and the Unity Asset store.

Adam has been hooked on roguelikes since finding Castle of the Winds in a bargain bucket, and has never beaten Nethack despite years of trying.

I made a sharp turn from math academia to software at the last moment. I'm a long time roguelike enthusiast and developer of a few 7DRLs, including Orcish Fury and Escape from Dump Moon Detritus 7.

Benet Devereux (he/him) is a professional software developer but an amateur game developer, and plans to keep things that way. He got hooked on roguelikes as a teenager playing `nethack` on his Atari ST and monochrome monitor, and only recently has started creating them. He is also an avid amateur naturalist, and enjoys trying to feed that understanding back into various kinds of software design.

Cara uses old technology to make new things. She's a computer necromancer, who works with everything from Telnet to VHS to Hypercard.

Hi! I'm the developer/designer of 20XX and 30XX, which are co-op-friendly roguelite megaman-ish (action platformer!) games.

We're big proponents of community-driven iteration-based development, so we'd like to talk about an aspect of that - community input on ongoing game features & balance during development!

Dustin is a Canadian who lives in NYC. His background is in building novel input techniques for creative, embodied expression. His PhD work was on gestural control (via Kinect) of real-time holograms during improvised theatre. Later, he worked on digital LARP platforms (ironically, hard to fundraise for right before the pandemic). By day, he now works on neuromotor input for AR at Meta. At Roguelike Celebration, he’ll talk about his long-running project: the procgen immersive sim Spirit of the Ages.

Dylan Gedig is an avid member of the games industry. He is the founder of Red Nexus Games and the designer of Peglin. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Global Game Jam, as the Regional Organizer for Canada and the US PNW for the IGDA, and regularly volunteers with Games For Our Future to help organize impactful gamedev events.

Evan (a.k.a. Shattered Pixel) is a solo game developer working on his first game for eight years and counting! Shattered Pixel Dungeon started life as a rebalance fork of Pixel Dungeon, but has steadily grown into its own full-fledged game.

I’m a PhD student in games AI at Queen Mary University of London. Before moving into games research, I worked as a field archaeologist and heritage consultant in London. I also have experience in games writing, working as a Story Tech for the independent games studio Die Gute Fabrik.

George Moromisato is an American software engineer and game designer. He is the developer of Transcendence, Anacreon, and Chron X.

I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember, though it wasn't until college when I was introduced to roguelikes. I graduated with a BA in anthropology and have done some art direction and level design on a small game jam project. I have a lot of areas of interest in anthropology, but some of the most prominent include the cultures of China, Eastern Europe, and Mesoamerica, as well as topics like transformative media in fandom and how different players interact with games.

Jack Schlesinger is a game designer, programmer, and writer, whose work includes Knotwords, Spelltower, Good Sudoku, Card of Darkness, and We Should Talk., among others! He teaches advanced graduate game programming at NYU and is currently working on a collaborative tabletop RPG with a procedural dungeon master called "If You Die in the Game, You Die in Real Life: The Game".

Janelle Shane's AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, and her book, "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works, and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place" use cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the artificial intelligence algorithms that run our world.

Jeremy has been playing roguelikes since he first discovered Alphaman at age 11 on a DOS machine in the back of his friend's mom's cafe. Though he's never ascended, the genre has remained (and will, he suspects, continue to be) a lifelong obsession. Perhaps, if he's lucky, he will pass on his love of roguelikes to his daughter when she's old enough to YASD.

Joel Ryan (Microchasm) is a 3D Modeler for VR Training Simulations, and an amateur game developer. He discovered traditional roguelikes in his mid twenties and has loved them ever since. He tries to stay active in the roguelike community, including being a judge for the 7DRL Challenge, making Let's Play videos of Sil-Q on Youtube, and creating the Sil-Q tileset, which is available as part of Sil-Q v1.5.

Phenry is a {Product | Game | Narrative} Designer living in San Francisco. He was a designer/developer on Firewatch (2016), creative director on Neo Cab (2019), and Design Lead on Cat Burglar (2022) for Netflix.

Philomena Schwab is a game designer and community manager from Zurich, Switzerland. She wrote her master thesis about “Community Building for Indie Developers” and went on to co-found the indie game studio Stray Fawn in 2016. In 2017 Philomena has been named a 30 under 30 in Technology in Europe by Forbes. As a vice president of the Swiss Game Hub, she helps the local game industry grow.

Stray Fawn Studio has released two simulation games with rougelike elements on Steam and is currently working on their third one. Procedural generation, replayability and emergent storytelling are at the core of their creations.

I am the game developer of Vagabond, a 2D sandbox RPG with procedural living worlds. I also write a blog where I like to share ideas and animations of procedural generators. If I am not at my computer, you will probably find me in my vegetable garden tending to my crops.

Reed Lockwood (aka @skeleton_hugs) is a Bay Area software developer who is interested in procedural generation, planning algorithms, emergent gameplay, and bunny rabbits.

Creator of Ananias, NovaMundi and about 26 more roguelikes of varying size, as well as Roguebasin, Temple of the Roguelike, and Roguenet. Long time indie game developer and procedural generation enthusiast.

Sergio started making games after getting his first PC with an 8086. Professionally, he's worked as a programmer on strategy games, shooters and 3rd-person action on a variety of platforms over the last 20 years. He started his own indie studio in 2020 and just shipped Mech Armada, a turn-based tactical roguelite, his first game as a solo developer.

Sersa Victory is editor-in-chief of Trident Gamebooks, which publishes Choose Your Own Adventure-style fantasy books aimed at tween and teen girls. He is also a roguelike developer and ENnie-nominated tabletop game designer whose work has been published by Kobold Press, DDE Adventures, and others. His most recent online course, Choice Design in Solo Adventure Gamebooks, is open for registration through Storytelling Collective.

Sherveen (he/him) is an award winning designer and producer based in Riverside, California. He was the Lead Producer of award winning Puzzle Platformer From Light, and Lead Mission Designer on We Are the Caretakers, an afrofuturist game about saving endangered animals from Aliens. His latest project is Midautumn, a supernatural game about blasting evil spirits, Asian diaspora culture and resisting gentrification. When not making games, there is a strong chance he is napping with his Chihuahua, Percy.

Sonat is a composer and programmer from Turkey. He has a degree in Computer Science and has a vast amount of music knowledge that he gathered from youtube, university, and through self-reflection. He had various experiences with music from being in bands to directing a musical to writing a folk song in protest of his school's decisions.

He developed many music software including note editors, synthesizers, and music generators and he had been making games for the past 4 years. 2010s roguelikes were very formative for him.

Tabea studied Game Design at the Zurich University of the Arts. Originally a Print Production Professional and Graphic Designer, she’s a jack of all trades when it comes to game development: Her skill set includes programming, game design, graphic design, as well as project management. Since 2014, Tabea worked for multiple renowned Swiss game companies and Universities, such as Blindflug Studios and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. In 2019 she founded Stardust, an indie game studio developing meaningful and diverse games. Her work challenges the status-quo of video games and expands the boundaries of topics and target audiences addressed by games. In her free-time, she's also a Women in Games ambassador.

Tyler Robertson is a writer, programmer, and spreadsheet artist living in London, England with his partner and their miniature dachshund. When he's not building "the Sistine Chapel of spreadsheets", he can be found roaming the English countryside or being really, really bad at Slay The Spire.

Younès is a game designer and creative AI researcher.

Their research is concerned with the relationship between a game's rules, its narrative, and how to build AI systems that can understand these relationships, manipulate them, and invent new ones.

Younès also has been a game developer for the past 10 years. They specialize in making strange ludic experiments and pitching new game ideas like a conspiracy theorist. Younès' nindo is to make games that can surprise both you and them!