GDX 2012 Speakers

• 
  Frank Delise of Autodesk

  Frank DeLise is a veteran video game designer with more than 17 years of experience as an artist, executive producer and founder of Kaos Studios. In the early '90s he joined Autodesk to lead the design on 3ds Max where he interacted with game developers and improved the process of making games. After more than six years at Autodesk, he started a small indie game development company called Trauma Studios to focus on his newfound passion around video games. Trauma's first project, "Desert Combat," was a military combat mod for "Battlefield 1942." "Desert Combat" went on to reach more than 3 million players and received several awards for mod of the year. DICE, developers of the Battlefield series, later acquired Trauma. At DICE he was responsible for gameplay design and research and development for the multimillion unit selling Battlefield 2.

  In 2005, DeLise formed a new studio in New York City focused around action games for publisher THQ, releasing "Frontlines: Fuel of War" and recently released "Homefront" for Xbox, PC and PS3, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide.

• 
  Jeremy Ernst of Epic Games

  Character rigger and technical animator Jeremy Ernst, of Epic Games, worked on "Condemned 2: Bloodshot," "Gears of War 2," "Shadow Complex," "Gears of War 3" and the upcoming "Fortnite." He makes up-to-date tools for animation and rigging through pursuit of the latest relevant technologies.

• 
  Dave Inscore of Zynga East

  Dave Inscore began his career as a video game art director in 2000 when he founded Big Huge Games. At Big Huge he provided artistic leadership for a team of more than 100 game developers—including a 26-person art department. Some of the studio's most successful games include Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends, the latter of which received Gamespy's 2006 Special Achievement in Art Direction Award. Game Revolution lauded it as "A playable piece of art…" and PC Gamer called it "… the best-looking RTS I've ever played."

  Inscore worked on a number of other successful gam es, including "Sid Meier's CivNet," "Sid Meier's Gettysburg!", "Magic: The Gathering," "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" and "Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties." In 2010, Inscore moved to social game development where he now serves as art director for Zynga East, the creators of FrontierVille.

• 
  Joe Maris from Microsoft Entertainment Division

  Joe Maris worked in the video games industry for more than 10 years, starting in quality assurance in the late '90s. After spending close to seven years at Maxis, where he worked on numerous Sims games, often in a lead role, he moved to the Pacific Northwest where he worked on first person shooters at Zipper Interactive for four years. Maris now works in the interactive entertainment division at Microsoft, where he is a design director in a publishing role.

• 
  Matthew Steinke of Ubisoft

  A founding member of Ubisoft Toronto, Matthew Steinke is technical director on the latest installment of the award winning "Tom Clancy's: Splinter Cell" series. A 13-year veteran of the commercial games industry, Steinke worked previously at Midway Games where he led teams in the research and development of tools and core gameplay features for "Mortal Kombat," "Stranglehold" and "PsiOps:The Mindgate Conspiracy." Heavily involved with the world-renowned Virtual Reality Application Centre, most of his time at university was spent in prototyping virtual environments. His research hobbies extend across various fields of cognitive science, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, mobile development and interactive design. Throughout his life, computers, games, comics and films heavily influenced him. Working in the games industry allowed Steinke to fulfill his lifelong dream of creating new technology in order to make science fiction fact.

• 
  Danny Williams of DreamWorks Animation

  Williams' career began at Blue Sky Studios, where from 1997 to 2008 he worked on commercials, environment modeling on "Ice Age," and the films "Robots," "Ice Age: The Meltdown" and "Rio." Williams also served as character modeling supervisor for "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!"

  In 2008, Williams joined ArenaNet as a character artist on "Guild Wars 2." While at ArenaNet, he founded the website lunchcrunch.org, which showcases the work process of artists from around the globe through time-lapse videos. In 2011, he returned to film by taking a position as a modeler at DreamWorks Animation where he has worked on "Puss in Boots" and "Turbo." He also serves as a character design instructor at visualarium.com.