[Livestream] Influences

Speakers

• Brandon Sheffield
  

  Brandon Sheffield

  “Brandon Sheffield is creative director of Necrosoft Games, directing titles like Gunsport, Oh, Deer!, and Gunhouse.

  He also works on game museums like Street Fighter 30th Anniversary, SNK 40th Anniversary, and Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection.

  He also co-hosts a podcast called insert credit, and advises a number of game conferences, such as GDC, DICE, and the Gamesbeat Summit.

  He has attended almost every indiecade, and misses the days of video game misfits taking over a parking lot with weird music and weirder games.

  He owns a lot of VHS tapes and a buff chihuahua.”

• Mariel Cartwright
  

  Mariel Cartwright

  Mariel Kinuko Cartwright is an artist, animator, and game developer. Selected previous credits include Creative Director/Art Director on Indivisible, Lead Animator on Skullgirls, and Animator on Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. She also speaks on game animation at conferences like GDC. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Tyson Hesse and dog Jijii.

• Nicole Lazzaro
  

  Nicole Lazzaro

  Nicole Lazzaro, immersive media trailblazer, entrepreneur, and game industry veteran has run XEODesign for 28 years. She discovered how game mechanics create emotion, designed the 1st iPhone game, and was the first to use facial expression to measure emotion during games. With this insight she created the 4 Keys to Fun used by millions of leading developers worldwide. Her 4 Keys are baked into the AI for the Sims and inspired IBM Watson’s sentiment analysis. Her game Tilt World planted 16K trees in Madagascar. Recent XR accomplishments include Follow the White Rabbit as well as Unscramble the Oracle, a choose your own adventure for AR headsets that inspires healthy play walking around the block. Lazzaro is currently developing a Virtual Real Estate Tour Application and advises several leading XR companies including Facebook. Lazzaro is widely cited by global news media such as Wired, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Samantha Bee, VentureBeat, CNN, CNET, and the Wall Street Journal. She has advised the Obama White House and the US State Department on the use of games to improve our world. Follow her on Twitter: @nicolelazzaro.
  ‘@NicoleLazzaro
  @PlayWhiteRabbit
  @4Keys2Fun

• Nonny de la Peña
  Nonny de la Peña
• Richard Lemarchand
  

  Richard Lemarchand

  Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, an educator, a writer, a public speaker and a consultant. He is an Associate Professor in the USC Games program, and is a faculty member of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Between 2004 and 2012, Richard was a lead game designer at Naughty Dog in Santa Monica, California. He led the design of all three PlayStation 3 games in the Uncharted series including Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – winner of ten AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards, five Game Developers Choice Awards, four BAFTAs and over 200 Game of the Year awards. Richard also worked on Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing for Naughty Dog, and helped to create the successful game series Gex, Pandemonium and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Richard now teaches game design, development and production in the USC Games program, and is working on a series of experimental game design research projects as part of the USC Game Innovation Lab. His game, The Meadow, a virtual reality art installation game co-created with Martzi Campos, was selected as a finalist in the 2015 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games, and his latest game, Phenomenology, a VR art game, was selected for exhibition at IndieCade 2018. He is working on a book for the MIT Press, due to be published in the fall of 2021.