Guest Speakers

Alma Talbot

Alma Talbot is a Development Manager at Motive and is part of the Dead Space Remake team. Her previous titles include Star Wars: Squadrons and Star Wars Squadrons: Live Service. Alma is the Chapter Lead of the Women’s Ultimate Team (Employee Resource Group) in Montreal. She’s a firm believer that innovation thrives when built on a foundation of diverse perspectives.

Amanda Farough

Amanda will be the moderator for the panel “Montreal Mobile: SPR – The Rise of AAA Mobile Experiences”.

Amanda Farough has been covering the video games and the game industry for over a decade in a variety of forms, including as a journalist, podcast host, professional speaker, and analyst. These days, Amanda co-hosts the Virtual Economy podcast; occasionally writes for the Washington Post, the ESRB, and GamesBeat; and streams on Twitch as ReadyPlayerMama as part of the Take This Ambassador stream team.

Cardell Kerr

Cardell Kerr has been in the game development industry for over 20 years, and has worked on multiple online games. Starting in MMO’s in the 2000’s on Asheron’s Call, he worked on Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. From there he moved on to more PvP Oriented games, with Infinite Crisis and his most recent game, Spellbreak.

https://www.proletariat.com

Carl Kwoh

“Carl Kwoh is the VP of Product at Phoenix Labs. Carl’s passion and expertise in the product space uniquely positions him to be a leader on Dauntless, the studio’s free-to-play action RPG with over 25 million players worldwide. Carl is also a key member of Phoenix Labs’ incubation program, where all new game concepts at the studio are realized and come to fruition. He helps teams define product goals and risks as they move from idea, to pre-production, and beyond.

Carl joined Phoenix Labs following a stint leading independent studio Ghostly Bear, which he co-founded, and prior to that he was a producer at Riot Games on League of Legends.”

https://phxlabs.ca/fr/

Chelsea Blasko

I’ve been with Iron Galaxy for 11 years, starting as employee number 13 with the company. I was in Production, but quickly started taking on more operational and HR duties, eventually becoming a partner in the company about six years ago and the Co-CEO with my counterpart, Adam Boyes.

Chris Quaidoo

Chris is an investor at Griffin Gaming Partners, a leading VC fund investing singularly in the gaming industry. Before joining Griffin, he worked as an equity analyst investing in publicly traded stocks in the technology sector, including gaming, leading investments in Activision Blizzard and Glu Mobile stocks. Chris also hosts the podcast Venture Games, in which he showcases conversations with guests in the gaming and VC industries. Chris is passionate about improving diversity in the VC and gaming industries, and has spoken candidly about the topic on his podcast and in other forums.

https://griffingp.com/

Christopher Chancey

Christopher will be the moderator for the panel “Nurturing an Industry Ecosystem”.

In addition to founding and leading ManaVoid Entertainment, Chris Chancey is Vice President and head of the Communications and Marketing Committee of the Quebec Video Game Guild. This association represents 250 Quebec studios and over 15,000 jobs. He also teaches game design at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue since 2016 and at the Université de Montréal since 2018.

Beyond ManaVoid, Chris Chancey is committed to the success of the Quebec video game industry. He co-founded Indie Asylum, a business incubator and gas pedal in this sector. It provides business development, mentoring, marketing support and investment in emerging companies.

In 2020, Chris Chancey received the prestigious ARISTA award from the Jeune Chambre de commerce de Montréal in the category of Young Techno-Creative Leader of Quebec.

David Giraud

David has worked in the entertainment industry since 1997. He worked at ubisoft, eidos, IO interactive, THQ to name a few and have created AAA characters mostly for in-games but also marketing and cinematic for games such as hitman, splinter cell, assassin’s creed, prince of persia, Rainbow 6, Street fighter 5, Devil may cry 5, Monster Hunter and many more. David work also in the collectible industry for sideshow, XM studios, DC direct and others and created dioramas, statues and busts for the last 10 years, he has been 3d art director at Volta for the past 7 years.

Deanna Stanley

Deanna will be the moderator for the panel ” Post launch life”.

Deanna Stanley is an Associate Producer at Ubisoft Montreal, working on Rainbow Six Siege. Starting in QC, she is now the main Live Stakeholder and oversees the long term closing and deployment strategy of Ubisoft’s largest GaaS. Prior to joining Ubisoft Montreal, Deanna spent 5 years with Nintendo Europe in Frankfurt Germany, supporting press events, conferences, and working as a data center technician. Deanna strives to bring calm and a positive outlook during Live Emergencies, as well as promote team health, and advocate for women in tech and leadership.

François Beauregard

A video game aficionado since his first SNES, François Beauregard has followed his passion for gaming and the industry throughout the last decade. With a background in Business Strategy from HEC, he grew his marketing career finding answers for companies in various
growing industries with innovation challenges. His newest career highlight, the Brand Manager for Unknown 9 at Reflector Entertainment. Working alongside a team of experts in the field, he is developing a new way to approach entertainment marketing with a AAA video game at the core. In his personal life, François has recently embarked on the wonderful life journey that is becoming a first-time dad. He also practises yoga and meditation daily to centre himself.

Hal Milton

Hal Milton is the Studio Design Director for Pipeworks Studios in Eugene Oregon. In his 25 years as a game developer he has worked on core, casual, social, and serious games on nearly every platform, with almost every major publisher and developer.

Jake Kulkowski

Previously a content creator himself, Jake joined Dead Good PR in 2019 and has, in less than two years, helped spearhead the agency’s organic content creation strategy.
Providing its clients with successfully integrated and targeted influencer coverage as part of a wider PR campaign, Jake has also expanded the international influencer consultant team into paid influencer marketing campaigns.

Jason Della Rocca

Jason is a game industry entrepreneur, funding advisor, and cluster expert. He specializes in business/partnership development, pitching/funding, and ecosystem/cluster development. As the co-founder of Executions Labs, he was a hands-on early-stage investor to 25 independent game studios from North America and Europe. Between 2000-09 he served as the executive director of the IGDA, and was honored for his industry building efforts with the inaugural Ambassador Award at GDC. As a sought-after expert on the game industry, Jason has lectured at conferences and universities worldwide.

Jesse Houston

Jesse Houston is an industry veteran in the gaming space, having started his career in 2000. Jesse is the CEO and co-founder of Phoenix Labs, which he and the other co-founders formed to bring players together through deep multiplayer games. Previously, he held key leadership roles at both Riot Games on League of Legends, and BioWare on the Mass Effect series. He also served as Production Director at Ubisoft, overseeing Project Management, Pipeline Planning, Development and Design, among other responsibilities.

JP Van Seventer

JP has been a game industry professional for 22 years, with a vision for optimizing the international success of aspiring and experienced game development companies. He has been a pioneer within the global game incubation/acceleration space since 2007 with the launch of Dutch Gamer Garden. JP has experience with games on all leading platforms ranging from mobile, console, pc, tablet, browser-based and custom platforms and VR/AR/XR in his extensive career. JP has a background in Industrial Design, Mechanical engineering and started his career as a game designer, 3d artist and level designer.

Julien Desaulniers

Julien has been working in the video games industry for over 20 years. Using technology to enrich the lives of people has always been the goal for him. In recent years, he has been more involved in management, identifying and fostering the key behaviours programmers need to adopt for successful development. He is also interested by many other types of experiences, such as playing music and discovering other cultures.

Justin Woodward

With a mixture of over 12 years of independent and AAA development and production experience and a master’s in Game Production and Management, Justin Woodward Co-founded and directs an independent game studio, Interabang Entertainment as well as The Media Indie Exchange (The MIX) which is an organization that helps to elevate indie developers’ visibility and business opportunities through exclusive indie showcases online and in-person worldwide. Being involved in the development scene has also lead him into the role as a lead advisor with Humble Bundle on the Humble Black Game Developer Fund as well as a consultant for the investment/crowdfunding platform Fig, IGN Prime, and has helped organize the IGN Indie Open House and Double Fine Indie spaces.

Kirill Tokarev

Effective media manager and product leader. Helped launch and develop 80 Level Media, 80 Level Talent recruitment service, 80 Level Research – market research agency. Acted as a producer on a number of visual production projects. SAFe-certified Agilist and Stanford University Graduate School of Business alumnus. Over 7 years of managing international projects with internal and external resources. Great experience finding and nurturing talent.

Lionel Fuentes

Lionel is a Technical Director at Asobo Studio. Among other things, at Asobo Studio he worked on two of the launch titles for Microsoft Hololens, participating in the creation of the first holographic videogames. Since 2016 he has been leading a team of engineers to create and improve the technology for Microsoft Flight Simulator, focusing on recreating a digital twin of the Earth, platform integration, game development pipelines, distribution pipelines, MSFS SDK… His interests vary between game asset and production pipelines, rendering, optimization, machine learning, team management and problem solving in general. He is also a piano and guitar enthusiast.

Marion-Isabelle Muszynski

Marion-Isabelle Muszynski leads the experience design practice for Electronic Arts’ Montreal Studio, Motive. Focusing on every aspect that affects the experience, Marion-Isabelle champions the highest level of player experience and journey for EA’s games: from removing basic friction to increasing motivation to play. Drawing from experience, research, playtest data, and feedback, she and her team are believers in the power of both basic and applied research in the design process.

Mathieu Dupont

Since he arrived at the beginning of 2019 as studio manager, Matthieu Dupont has devoted his energy to creating all the necessary conditions for Gameloft Montreal to flourish and for its products to succeed. Before crossing the Atlantic, he worked in several important positions at Gameloft’s headquarters in Paris and was actively involved in the success of the company’s games, particularly the Dungeon Hunter franchise. Matthieu currently leads the production several games, some of which are Gameloft originals while others are partnerships with top licensors.

Micheal Silverwood

Michael is the CEO & co-founder of Pixile Studios, and co-creator of Super Animal Royale, a 64-player battle royale that pits murderously adorable animals against each other in a fight to reach the top of the food chain. He previously worked in venture capital for San Francisco-based Tandem Capital for 5yrs, helping pre-seed and seed stage startups design, build and launch their products. Outside of game design and entrepreneurship, Michael is a long-term kitten foster parent and connoisseur of fine animal puns.

Moncef Bahmed

As an expert in financial planning, he has been working in the financial field for over ten years. During all these years, he has always put the interest of the members first and has done everything in his power to help them achieve their projects through complete financial plans.

Passionate about financial planning, he is considered a resource person within his team and is recognized by his colleagues for his willingness to share his passion and expertise for financial planning.

Outside of work, Moncef is also passionate about food and travel.

Nicolas Eypert

Nicolas has 30+ years of industry experience, starting as a programmer in the 16bits era, up to being Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal.

He has worked on both AAA games and new creations in the online space, also designing new projects incubation environments.
His main area of focus is the conception of new games and particularly processes to drive the creation phases of such games.

He co-created Watcha Games which works on a new type of games designed specifically for the new market of streamers – viewers communities on interactive streaming platforms like Twitch.

Nicolas Guerin

Spiritfarer’s Creative director, Nicolas Guérin is also credited as Lead Designer and Lead Writer on the game.
A true passion project, Spiritfarer allowed him to finally take the creative liberties and methods only a nimble and dedicated studio such as Thunder Lotus made possible.

Before his enthusiastic leap to the Indie scene, he assumed various key design roles throughout his decades-old career in the video game industry, working on AAA franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, and Skate for Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.
To him, games have a duty to mean something, have a purpose, and show heart, soul, and ambition.
Father, husband, and proud cat lover, Nick has spent a lifetime fulfilling quests in many different types of digital or physical media but still sees tabletop RPGs as the pinnacle of interactive entertainment.

Patrick Naud

Patrick Naud has over 20 years of video game industry experience.Today, as Head of Mobile for the Square Enix Group and Head of Studio for Square Enix Montréal, he helms mobile development for Square Enix in Canada, the US,and Europe, overseeing product and business strategies. Under Patrick’s leadership, Square Enix Montréal launched the highly successful and award-winning GO trilogy (Lara Croft GO, Hitman GO, Deus EX GO) and Hitman Sniper. Square Enix Montréal recently announced 2 new games in development: Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and a new experience for mobile based on Space Invaders.

Peter Sikachev

Peter Sikachev – currently a Principal Graphics Programmer at People Can Fly – has been in AAA game development industry for almost a decade. He worked with many top studios including Rockstar Toronto, Eidos Montreal, and CD Projekt Red, contributing to multiple AAA titles, such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, among others. He also shared his work through events and publications, most notably at SIGGRAPH conferences and in GPU Pro book series.

Phil Duncan

Phil is the co founder and design director at Ghost Town Games. Creators of the award winning and relationship challenging Overcooked series.

Philippe Renaud

Philippe Renaud leads the User Experience research efforts for EA’s Motive & Bioware studios. The User Experience Research (UXR) team’s purpose is to deliver a deep understanding of players to inform and improve the user experience of EA’s game. By embedding UX researchers into the development teams, UXR partners work closely with analysts, designers, artists and production managers to ensure EA’s products benefit from a strong, agile and iterative research process. Phil holds an MSc in Marketing research and has been doing research in the video game industry for nearly 15 years.

Philomena Schwab

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. The studio’s main focus is the development of procedurally generated simulation games. 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.

Richard Laberge

Richard LaBerge is Vice President of Gaming and Technology Partnership with D-BOX Technologies inc. Richard has more than 20
years of experience in media and technology with the majority of that experience in immersion technologies. Before D-BOX, Richard cofounded Sensio where he negotiated agreements with major TV manufacturers (LG, SAMSUNG, Vizio and Panasonic) to provide access to 3D content online. He was also instrumental in signing distribution contracts with Hollywood studios (Disney, Universal, FOX, Paramount and Warner) and independent shops for the 3DGO! VOD service offering the largest 3D movie library on most Smart TV.

Robert Bäckström

Games producer with more than 15 years of development experience and 10 plus titles.

Extensive knowledge of console and PC development, publishing and business development, mainly premium games within the indie segment but also games as a service and live ops.

Angel investor and DIY-believer, with experience from several startups.

Sheenah Ko

Raised in Toronto, New Mexico, Texas, Saskatchewan and Hawaii, Sheenah Ko has lived most of her life moving across North America with a thirst for discovery. Raised by Chinese/Irish immigrant artists, Sheenah began composing original songs and studying piano and percussion when she was 5. By the time she was 16, she was touring across North America performing vibraphone and shortly after writing original compositions for touring bands.

Multi-disciplinary, it wasn’t until 2010 that Sheenah decided to dive headfirst into music and leave her successful corporate career to exploring her passion for arts in Montreal. In a decade, she went from knowing little about the Quebecois music scene to touring internationally with musicians from The Band, Lou Reed, Ron Sexsmith, The Barenaked Ladies, and the Nylons. Presently, she is the full-time keyboardist for The Besnard Lakes (Flemish Eye) and continues to tour with an extensive list of bands, including Bedouin Soundclash (Sony), Little Scream (Merge Records), Antoine Corriveau (Secret City), Folly Joseph Edgar (Rosemarie Records) and Thor Harris (Swans).

In 2018, Sheenah decided to take things to the next level and challenge herself as a solo artist with the release of her first album, FREE. She began performing solo; inspiring and dramatic performances with analog keyboards and synths, driving beats, fierce, enigmatic vocals, beautiful visuals and a contemporary dancer. Her solo performances opening for bands such as Ex Eye (Relapse), Liima/Efterklang (4AD), and festivals including Montreal Jazz Festival, Dusklit (New York), Sled Island, and Halfway Festival (Poland) have been described as hypnotic, powerful, and emotional.

Despite being released at the beginning of the pandemic, Sheenah’s debut album, Nowhere In Time, made it to the top ten national electronic charts. Her music video for her first single, Wrap Me Up, won the prize for Best Choreography at the UK Music Video Awards and is nominated for Music Video of the Year in the 2021 Juno Awards. Following her debut album’s success, Sheenah is currently co-producing her sophomore album with producers, Jace Lasek, Ryan Battistuzzi, and Steeven Chouinard.

The pandemic also opened the door to video game composition when Sheenah teamed up with Antoine Vachon to co-compose many of the tracks on the Rainbow Billy Soundtrack. Together, they “locked themselves” into a studio during the initial lockdown in Quebec, and brought together their extensive collection of vintage/new analog and digital synthesizers to co-compose many of the tracks on the soundtrack, including the theme song. It was also an excellent opportunity to employ many of Sheenah’s friends who were stuck at home with canceled tours, and you can hear some incredible musicians on the Rainbow Billy soundtrack, like banjo player Jordan Officer, trumpeter Andy King and drummer Kevin Warren.

Sophia Feng

Sophia Feng is an investor at Makers Fund, a global interactive entertainment VC firm focused on early-stage investments. With over 75 portfolio companies to date, Makers is dedicated to furthering growth and innovation in the interactive entertainment industry. Sophia works with portfolio companies and founders across North America. Prior to Makers, she worked with US consumer tech companies on strategy.

Stéfan Beauchamp-Daniel

Stefan will be the moderator for the panel “Cross platform performance: making multiplayer work”.

Stefan Beauchamp-Daniel, senior producer at Behaviour Interactive, has over ten years of experience in game development. He is currently overseeing all aspects of production on Dead By Daylight, having the joined the project before its launch in June 2016. Having seen the game evolve from a single platform launch (Steam) to the cross-platform beast it has become over the years, he has a good understanding of the challenges & complexity involved in multi-platform development. Prior to this, while employed at Behaviour Interactive, he had worked with multiple external partners on various work-for-hire and co-development projects, on titles such as FarCry 3 (Ubisoft), Halo Waypoint (Microsoft) & Star Citizen (Cloud Imperium Games).

Stephane Gayraud

Stephane Gayraud is Lead of Analytics for Motive, an Electronic Arts studio. Through analytics (including AI), he and his team are responsible for bringing actionable player insights throughout the game development process and post-launch. Stephane is a strong believer in balancing data with intuition, and he thrives in creative environments. He has developed and led multidisciplinary analyticsteams in consumer software, fashion retail and more recently, transportation & logistics. Stephane holds an MSc in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from Dartmouth College.

Stéphanie Bouchard

Stéphanie will be the moderator for the panel “Creating believable characters”.

For 14 years, Stéphanie Bouchard has worked as a System Designer in AAA, indie, academic research, R&D and freelance games. She worked on all types of games, with all kinds of constraints, with or without budget.

After 8 years as a generalist, she fell in love with creating homicidal characters and decided to specialize in artificial intelligence. After all, someone has to make Black Mirror a reality! Distant dystopian futures don’t just happen, it’s a lot of work and cardio!

Stu Taylor

Working in the creative industries for over 25 years, from writer/editor on a variety of video game / pop culture magazines through to PR Director and Owner of Dead Good Media (the company behind Dead Good PR, Dead Good Comics and Game Tomb).
Making the move to full-time PR in 2007, Stu has led and provided vital contribution to the lifestyle and specialist games press PR campaigns for titles like Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dying Light, Dead Island, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, DJ Hero, Guitar Hero 5, BioShock 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Thierry Boulanger

After 8 years as a game programming team leader, Thierry launched Sabotage in April 2016, where he leads the design and production of games mixing retro aesthetics and modern design.

Following the success of his first title The Messenger, Sabotage is currently working on Sea of Stars, an RPG inspired by SNES classics.

Stay tuned for more speakers in the upcoming days!

2021 Guest Speakers