IGDA Students Podcast: Games Industry Career Advice & Resources for Aspiring Game Developers

John Smith is a composer and sound designer based in Seattle who works under the name Slide20xl. His credits include music and sound design for the VR title Rec Room, the neuroscience game EyeWire, and an upcoming rhythm game which will feature music from Grant Kirkhope and other big-name composers. Check out his website and ... Read more

Gideon Gyabaah is an indie game developer who grew up in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. He currently lives in Canada where he attended university, then worked as a web developer, a game development instructor, a developer at GameTronics (they make electronic slot machines), a localization engineer at THQ. Today he runs his own indie company ... Read more

Hailing from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, Coraly’s adventure started over 12 years ago when she first took interest in graphic design and teaching. Later, her innate interests naturally evolved into a love-affair with UI/UX in games, working at startups like Beyond Games, Fingerprintplay, and continuing to teach others about user research and experience ... Read more

Mike Sellers has been in the games industry for decades. He was the lead designer for Meridian 59, the first 3D MMO game. He’s also worked on The Sims 2, Ultima Online, a mix of indie, AAA, retail, and F2P games, and he once worked on AI for DARPA. He is currently teaching at Indiana University, where he is ... Read more

“I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I love story-driven, adventure, puzzle, and platformer games. I’m a big horror fan. My Twitter handle is @chulatastic, and my company’s website is elinemedia.com.” Elaine works at E-Line Media, the company that created Gamestar Mechanic and they worked with Upper One Games to publish Never Alone. Elaine works as a game designer/content developer, ... Read more

Taro Omiya and Frederika Edgington-Giordano run the Tech Valley Game Space. TVGS is one of the largest non-profit gamedev communities in the Capital Region of New York founded on the principle that games and game-making are for everyone. Taro and Frederika are the directors who handle the co-working office and the educational hub of TVGS respectively. ... Read more

Dr. Luke Dicken is Zynga Inc’s Director of Central and Strategic Analytics, where he leads teams in driving innovation across the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, and Data Science, with a particular focus on applications to large-scale business problems. He is also Chair of the IGDA Foundation, a charity by game developers for game developers. ... Read more

“Hi! My career journey took me from customer service on World of Warcraft to Senior Producer on AAA development teams. I work with multidisciplinary teams to create awesome game experiences.” Ryan Treadwell has worked on a variety of games, including Dragon Age: Inquisition, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Remastered, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and World of Warcraft. He’s worked ... Read more

Ditto is a programmer, game designer, and artist whose indie studio Art in Heart created GoNNER. Follow Ditto on Twitter. This is a recording of an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session with Mattias “Ditto” Dittrich, hosted by the IGDA Student SIG. If you’re interested in doing an AMA with students, you can sign up here.

Anthony is an environment artist at Hardsuit Labs, currently working on an unannounced game. He’s been working around games for about 10 years now, originally starting out as an animator and eventually transitioning to environment art. Some projects that he’s worked on include: Desert Bus VR, he made one asset for Lawbreakers, and a variety of indie games listed on ... Read more