After a decade working as a collegiate IT gal and professor of sound art and general game design nerdery, Alexandra crossed the globe to start her next adventure as a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, where she studies ludonarrative design and its intersection with queer theory while dabbling in making quirky gay games. She is a quirky, biohacked roguedyke scholar living with her wife in Wellington, New Zealand, where they enjoy lots of great vegetarian food and pinball.
Andrew Plotkin's life was forever changed at the age of 8 when he got to try Colossal Cave on a teletype terminal. It was forever changed several times after that, too, but the adventure game bug stuck around.
Bjarke A. Larsen is a technical narrative designer and researcher, with a Ph.D. on storytelling in live service games. He is interested in stories and communities, and how the two intermingle. He also has a deep love of database games and logic puzzles and somehow managed to squeeze all of that into a narrative game about sacred trains.
Co-Founder of Freehold Games and Co-Creator of Caves of Qud
Chelsea Thompto is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working across art, trans studies, and technology. Her work is focused on the trans body as a site of political potential and engages digital and traditional media. She received an MFA in 4D Art and an MA in Gender and Women’s Studies both from the University of Wisconsin Madison and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
Amateur game developer. (I develop games under the Sustainable Games label but, considering I have no game dev revenue, I would say that qualifies me as an amateur!)
I like making narrative games and tend to focus on sustainability.
Long time interactive fiction fan, roguelike dungeon crawler, and retro gamer. (Though I was playing those games before they were called retro games!) Also really love indie games, but I can get into AAA games if they have a strong narrative.
I’ve been designing and programming games since about 1971. I’ve been employed at small studios for about 10 years total, but mostly worked as an indie. My first procedural narrative, King of Dragon Pass, came out in 1999, and that design space continues to intrigue me.
hello i am droqen! i make games and write poetry. lately i have been thinking, in a very unlimited way, about what i don't like about games, and why i keep making them anyway. i released The End of Gameplay in may of 2025, on the full moon.
Everest Pipkin is a writer, game developer, artist, and educator whose work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and fantasies of collapse and isolation– as well as the labor, maintenance, devotion, and collective care so often present in those fantasies. They produce printed material as books and zines, as well as digital work for the browser and in game engines. They also make drawings on paper.
g blekkenhorst is a Canadian artist and experimental narrative designer working across multiple media, but tending towards games, ttrpgs, comics, writing, fabrication, poetry, illustration, etc, etc, and next week they'll be someone else. they teach Games & Prototyping at York University, and have had games featured in Superfest and Toronto Games Week.
Their work deals with concepts of fear, vulnerability, monstrous embodiment, cognitive dissonance, reluctant capitalism, never knowing what’s going on inside the meat or the mind of yourself or anyone else and feeling generally haunted. Hide yourself in speculative fiction and you’ll never be seen for what you really are.
Gillian Smith is a Professor and Director of the Interactive Media and Game Development Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She makes games and procedurally generated craft projects, teaches classes about procgen and novel interface design, and researches critical AI literacy and novel approaches to pedagogy.
Greg is a lifelong game designer who has been programming since age 11. He has published a few million+ player video games, designed board games and paper puzzles, written music and poetry, and generally been impossible to pin down. Roguelikes and procedural generation are a key puzzling passion for him -- everything can be optimized!
My name is Jamie Brittain, I started my career as a television writer, co-creating the teen drama 'Skins', and working on shows like Dates, Kiss Me First and Breeders for the best part of 2 decades. But I always loved games far more than tv, and after managing to con my way onto the Crate & Crowbar podcast (a podcast hosted by several games journos and devs, including previous RC speaker Tom Francis), I was then able to find a job working as lead writer on a 'AAA narrative led driving game' currently being made by Maverick Games. I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time.
A recovering academic, Roguelike fan and barfly at the dungeon potion bar, Johnathan has performed a crime or five brewing his own potions via the arcane rituals of JavaScript, Python, Context-Free Grammars and Probabilistic Soft Logics. Some were crimes against software, others were crimes against flavor and the last few were crimes against fashion (unrelated).
Come say hi in the conference virtual space! He'd love to hear about whatever cool thing has you currently excited, will happily yap about his own weird path in and out of the games industry and how Ordinary Differential Equations can simulate Flappy Bird.
Joris Dormans is the founder and game director at Ludomotion where puts into practice his theoretical PhD work on emergent gameplay and procedural content generation. Ludomotion made a name for itself with Unexplored and its successor Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer's Legacy. Currently Joris is working on Bane: Dawn of the Lost; a multiplayer turn based generative RPG. He is also an assistant professor at Leiden University where he teaches Game Studies to humanities and computer science students.
I occasionally make mediocre roguelike games (Atlas Warriors, Jellymancer), and I've played them for far more years than my winrate in ADOM would suggest.
I still do a bit of game design focused on cube rail games, occasionally speak, spend my professional life tech-leading, and spend much of my formally abundant hobby time parenting a toddler.
I really love applying ways of thinking from my broad interests and experience to other worlds I inhabit.
Martin Pichlmair is a game developer, researcher, founder, and former media artist. He founded three game studios (and worked on a dozen games), designed a university degree for games education, and seriously has the academic title of Doctor of Technology. He exhibited art in Hong Kong, designed IGF- & IndieCade-nominated games, loves to cook hot food and his research is referenced on the Wikipedia page of The Legend of Zelda.
Matt Carney is an editor and musician living in California. His editing credits include the video games NORCO (2022) and Perfect Tides: Station to Station (2026) as well the TTRPGs The Creation of Wonder (2025) and Forget Starlight (2026). He also created the generative card game air light water moon shadow sky and performs experimental music as silo homes.
I’m a full stack developer and former field engineer with a systems-oriented mindset. I started restoHack and protoHack as a way to learn C by restoring early Hack source code, which turned into a deeper effort to reconstruct its history directly from original materials.
My work focuses on getting these early versions running on modern systems while comparing them against known variants to understand how Hack evolved. Along the way, I’ve worked with recovered source from PDP-11 backups and used direct code comparison to piece together parts of the game’s history that aren’t clearly documented elsewhere.
This project has been picked up within the roguelike preservation community and is now used in historical demos and exhibits.
Mike Cook is a game designer, writer and AI researcher based in London, UK. They work as a Senior Lecturer at King's College London, where they research how technology shapes our creativity (for better and worse). Beyond their day job, they make weird games and digital art, and perform as a livecoder. In the past they founded PROCJAM and developers game-designing AI like ANGELINA and Puck, and recently wrote the procedural generation book Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves. They are still struggling to regain their position as a top-10 speedrunner in a game about flipping coins.
Technical Narrative person with a bunch of cancelled games under his belt, but I got to work on the Nemesis System, so at least that was cool. Also I make the MUD space for THIS VERY CONFERENCE! WHOA!
Nic Tringali is a game designer best known The Banished Vault and Amberspire and has worked on a variety of games over the years including tactics, puzzle, and analog microgames. They’re currently developing the tabletop RPG Forget Starlight and cohosting the design podcast Paper Labyrinths.
I have worked mostly on narrative games (Tributary Games' King of the Castle) and mostly join narrative game jams (shout out to InkJam). I've been entranced by the economy and imagination of traditional roguelikes, and thanks to the rot.js library have made some experiments in the genre before properly giving 7DRL a try.
Nick likes to make games that play with the boundaries of genre and player expectation in order to explore the problems of the world in a more approachable way. You might remember him from such games as Trash the Planet or Skeal. Over the past 15 years, he's worked a bunch of unusual, fascinating, and sometimes unsavory jobs throughout the tech and games spaces. He's also been blogging about games since 2008, which is a very long time to do something. And he's very pleased to meet you!
Paris Buttfield-Addison makes games and tools in Hobart, Tasmania, as a co-founder of Secret Lab (Night in the Woods) and one of the people behind Yarn Spinner, the free dialogue tool that powers everything from DREDGE to Venba to Night in the Woods. He has degrees in medieval history and computer science, is partway through a law degree for reasons that remain unclear, and presents a space news segment on local radio. Most recently he helped build Hint Line '93, a playable museum exhibit about a fake 1993 game hint line. He's currently working on I Feel Fine, written by Ryan North, and Leonardo's Moon Ship, created by Jim Capobianco (he wrote Ratatouille).
Paul Hembree holds a PhD in Composition, supported by Computer Music research, from UC San Diego. He has worked as a hybrid composer-programmer on ethical procedural music generation and machine learning at Amper Music and BandLab, where all training data was created by fairly compensated in-house composers. His indie games, developed with Platypus Games, include Rite of Tephra (2019) and Woolgatherer (2023), featuring microtonal orchestral music in non-standard equal temperaments. He has presented at GDC, GameSoundCon, and Roguelike Celebration, and is currently developing foundobjects.org, an independent project using Euclidean rhythms for ethical beat generation.
Scott Anderson is a software engineer and game designer with nearly 20 years of game industry experience. He has worked on everything from independent titles like Luna and Shadow Physics, to Call of Duty to Oculus Rift. He currently works at Unity Technologies as a Senior Graphics Engineer.
Sersa Victory is an award-winning game designer and writer specializing in tournament adventures for tabletop RPGs. In addition to the top-selling deathtrap dungeons he releases through Trident Gamebooks, his work has been published by Kobold Press, MCDM Productions, Gygax Ink, The Merry Mushmen, Savage Realms Monthly, DMR Books, and many others. In 2012, Chris Perkins and the D&D community voted him Apprentice of Acererak, the undead architect of the infamous Tomb of Horrors.
Slashie is a longtime roguelike developer and fan who has been thinking about roguelikes for over half his life (and it’s not that short). He created RogueTemple and RogueBasin ages ago, has taken part in every 7DRL Challenge, and has been around long enough to watch the genre evolve from an extremely niche community into one with an extremely fuzzy definition.
Slashie thinks roguelikes are still very cool, even after all these years.
Stella graduated UCSC with a PhD from the Games and Playable Media program, but currently is leaving that while she works at Google. Her side hobbies include the occasional game jam, being a Randomizer developer and being extremely gay.
Tim founded an independent game studio that has successfully launched multiple titles which have won over twenty awards, collaborated with acclaimed fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to build captivating worlds, launched a game studio in partnership with JJ Abrams, worked on top grossing animated films at Dreamworks, and contributed to multiple AAA game projects.
Founder of Retora Games & Ludo Systems Inc. Tyler worked in mobile games for over a decade. During that time, the studio has developed over a dozen games internally and for third parties. The biggest hit is Merchant and Merchant Guilds; he has also worked as a System Designer for Fun & Games, Adjunct at University of Texas at Austin, and University of California Santa Cruz.
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