Dr. Sebastien Deguy
Dr. Deguy is the CEO and Founder of Allegorithmic, the company behind the ProFX procedural map authoring and rendering system. Dr. Deguy has a computer science background with a specialization in mathematics, random processes, simulation, computer vision and image synthesis. He is also an award-winning director and producer of traditional and animated short films.

Gilles Fleury
Gilles is the Lead Technical Artist at Allegorithmic and the #1 specialist of MaP Zone 2, the authoring tool of ProFX, the novel procedural techniques proposed by Allegorithmic based on the FX Maps concept. Besides being a gaming nut and game industry cool news seeker, Gilles constantly invents new visual effects and rendering styles to be used by artists for their upcoming creations.

David Freeman
David bridges the world of games and film. Along with his game design and writing consultancy The Freeman Group (www.freemangames.com), he is working or has worked as a designer and/or writer on “Prey,” “Van Helsing,” “Shark Tale,” “Terminator: Redemption,” “Marc Ecko’s ‘Getting Up – Contents Under Pressure,’” “Enter the Matrix,” the upcoming “Brooktown” for Konami, and many others. David is the author of the influential book, “Creating Emotion in Games,” with a foreword by Will Wright. He has been a frequent speaker at many game publishers, and at game conferences around the world including numerous past GDCs and DICE. As a writer and producer, David has had scripts and ideas bought or optioned by MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Castle Rock, and many other film and television companies. He also teaches “Beyond Structure” (www.beyondstructure.com), L.A.’s most popular screenwriting workshop (also offered in New York & London). David welcomes your correspondence at david@freemangames.com.

Duncan Frostick – Combat Code Ninja
Duncan graduated from Birmingham way back in July 2005, and somehow got a job as a Junior Programmer with Ninja Theory three weeks later. Raw with withdrawal from student life, he was gently introduced to the combat system. After a while their relationship blossomed enabling him to shed his 'Junior' tag and become a fully fledged combat/gameplay/occasional physics/bosses ninja. When he's not introducing new and interesting bugs to Heavenly Sword, he likes to pretend he's not a geek - but with over 40 'iconic' t-shirts, and more computers than fingers, he pretty much traps himself in the stereotype.

Michael Khaimzon
Bio to follow.

Nina Kristensen – Chief Development Ninja
Nina entered the games industry joining Millennium Interactive as a graduate artist. She spent two years modelling and animating MediEvil's quirky in-game characters. At Sony, Nina worked as a Lead Artist later to become Art Manager for the Cambridge Studio. Working to strict deadlines, she recruited and deployed art resources across internal and external projects, including the BAFTA award winning MediEvil II. Upon founding JAM (Just Add Monsters) in 2000, Nina was primarily responsible for project management and art direction as well as company strategy. JAM soon recruited an exceptional Lead Artist for Kung Fu Chaos and Nina was able to focus on the role of Producer, delivering the title on time and on budget. She strongly believes in working closely with publishers maintaining an open and candid dialogue throughout the development process. Since Just Add Monsters became Ninja Theory in 2004, Nina now holds the role as co-founder and Chief of Development.

SaiTong Man – Combat Design Ninja
SaiTong joined Ninja Theory, formerly Just Add Monsters, a little over four years ago leaving behind a life of design engineering to work on the company’s first game, Kung Fu Chaos. When Just Add Monsters (who reformed as Ninja Theory) began working on Heavenly Sword, he was given the task to design and develop a new combat system. Over the last few years of development, working with a close knit team of programmers, designers and animators, SaiTong has designed and combined the features and content in order to implement the combat system for the currently highly anticipated next-gen title Heavenly Sword. SaiTong’s favourite word is potato.

Guy Midgley – Lead Animation Ninja
Guy became embroiled in the games industry more than six years ago, joining the fledgling Just Add Monsters as a Character Artist. Guy was responsible for the unique design and creation of the characters in Kung Fu Chaos. Along with a small team of animators he created all the character content in the game. Following this, Guy took the role Lead Animator on Heavenly Sword. His role comprises of guiding a significant team of highly talented animators in the production of the title’s stunning character animations. When not animating, Guy spends his remaining hours wishing he owned a DeLorean.

Peter Molyneux
Peter is one of the computer games industry's most articulate and eloquent speakers on computer games development. He co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987 and created a new genre of computer games, 'the god game' with the release of POPULOUS. Since then, Peter has been responsible for a string of massive selling games including POWERMONGER, THEME PARK, MAGIC CARPET and DUNGEON KEEPER. In 1997 Peter left Bullfrog Productions to form Lionhead Studios. Lionhead has released two games, BLACK & WHITE and FABLE, and is working on four new titles. He recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Abertay and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

Andrew Oliver
Andrew Oliver is co-founder and co-owner of Blitz Games and took on the role of Technical Director when he and his twin brother Philip started the company in 1990 following nearly ten years of designing and writing highly successful video games. In August 2002 he was appointed Chief Technical Officer and is now responsible for all aspects of the company's game development direction and future technology strategy. He ensures that the company's reputation for high quality development standards, prompt delivery and the creation of cutting edge in-house tools is consistently maintained.

Eric Reinhart
Eric Reinhart works as an Application Engineer within the Consumer Software Enabling Team for Intel GmbH based in Munich, where he supports games and creativity application developers in Europe. In his 20+ years in the software development business he enjoyed working on games, serious simulations and amongst other things, room sized 3D visualization systems.

Harvey Smith
Harvey Smith is a game designer and creative director who has been making games professionally since 1993. Currently, he works for Midway as Studio Creative Director in Austin. He worked at Ion Storm (Austin) from 1998 to 2004, acting as project director of Deus Ex: Invisible War and lead designer on the award winning Deus Ex. (Deus Ex was given the BAFTA in 2000.) Prior to Ion Storm, he worked at Multitude, an Internet startup in San Mateo, CA. There he was lead designer of FireTeam, an innovative tactical squad game that was one of the earliest video games to feature Internet voice-communications between players. Smith started his career at Origin Systems, working there for almost four years. Harvey also won the Game Design Challenge at GDC 2006 with his game "Peace Bomb," modeled after the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jonathan Story
Jonathan Story is an Application Engineer working within the Consumer Software Enabling team at Intel GmbH in Munich. The main focus of his work is supporting game developers in Europe. With around ten years of experience in the games industry Jonathan has a wealth of programming knowledge in the fields of 3D, optimization and multi-threading.

Chris Williams
As Project Lead at LucasArts, Chris Williams’ primary responsibility is to deliver a high-quality title on time and on budget. He manages a team and guides the development effort, also interfacing with other departments regarding the project, both internal and external. After graduating from Cornell University with a B.Arch. in architecture in 1998, Williams began his professional career at LucasArts as a 3D Modeler and has stayed with the company ever since. Williams has contributed to seven LucasArts releases, including:

• Star Wars Obi-Wan (3D Modeler)
• Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (Lead Artist)
• Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns (Lead Artist)
• Star Wars Republic Commando (Lead Artist, Line Producer, then Producer)
• LEGO Star Wars: The video game
• Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (DS)
• Star Wars: Empire at War (Supervising Producer).

He is currently working as the Project Lead on LucasArts’ next-gen Indiana Jones game, which will involve frequent interaction with Industrial Light & Magic.