2025
Aaron Abt is a game designer from Zurich, Switzerland. After graduating from the Zurich Universities of the Arts in 2019, he co-founded Lululu Entertainment with two friends from the studies. As part of Lululu Entertainment, he helped to create their debut game “Bamerang” and their recently released second game “Henry Halfhead”. Besides the work at Lululu he designed and developed VR and AR experiences at the digital agency Ateo.
(Interviewed by Marcia Shange)
Abubakar Salim is the CEO and Creative Director at Surgent Studios. Surgent’s BAFTA-winning debut game, Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, was released in 2024. Surgent’s second title, Dead Take, was released in 2025.
A BAFTA nominated actor, Salim’s work in games spans Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, Diablo IV, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins in which he played Bayek. He is known for a number of film and television roles as well, including Father in Raised by Wolves and Alyn of Hull in House of the Dragon. In 2020 Salim was chosen as one of BAFTA’s Breakthrough Brits and was revealed at the London Games Festival as one of eight industry faces of Games London Ensemble.
Ammaarah began her journey as an aspiring chemical engineer, but soon realised that she wanted to focus on more creative exploits. This led her to pursue a degree in Digital Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she later stayed on as a tutor and Master’s student. Her academic research focused on thematic integration in board game design — exploring how mechanics and theme can work in harmony to create a unique experience.
Though no longer in academia, she briefly lectured an Android development course at Vega before transitioning into the games industry. She now works as a QA tester at 24 Bit Games, steadily carving out her path toward the title she feels most drawn to: experience designer. Ammaarah is also part of the current team behind the Campus Game Jam.
Bracken (he/him) took a frolic through the lovely field of game design on his way to becoming a science teacher. In the field, he came across a group of goblins, who tricked him and made him lose his way. Then, he stumbled upon a witch and he asked her for directions, but she put a spell on him and now he cannot stop frolicking. For 11 years he has been cursed to be involved in game design, education, and community building. He is currently based in Johannesburg, where he spends his days remote-frolicking with Clockwork Acorn. When the sun sets, the curse is temporarily lifted, and he is able to spend his nights teaching in peace.
Bridie is a Senior Producer at Devolver Digital working on a variety of games, some of which have even been released (The Talos Principle 2, Minos, The Dungeon Experience, Stick it to the Stickman). She is responsible for bringing people together to organise the release of a game, working closely with her developers to ensure that the team feels supported, and has everything they need to make a great game. This often involves a lot of time looking at Spreadsheets or Jira.
Chipzel is a BAFTA nominated, award winning Producer, Sound Designer and Composer from Northern Ireland. Chipzel comes from an internet subculture of tinkerers, makers and curious creatives known as Chiptune which has roots in the first computer art movement known as the Demoscene.
A recognised pioneer of the Chiptune scene, Chipzel’s prolific musical career has seen her touring the world, bringing her acclaimed sound across the globe. With multiple studio albums, over a decade of countless, beloved original Videogame Scores and iconic performances, Chipzel is best loved for her idiosyncratic original works including Super Hexagon, Spectra and quiz game inspired favourite, Dicey Dungeons.
Dr David Backwell is a medical doctor and cognitive systems consultant based in Cape Town, whose work explores how the mind constructs meaning.
He is the founder of Triliteral, a consulting practice that helps leaders and teams think more clearly by applying ideas from cognitive neuroscience, systems theory, and cybernetics. He also runs The Mental Spectacle, a weekly Substack on how we make sense of the world, and maintains a clinical practice focused on cognitive restructuring, adjustment, and insomnia.
In his work, David explores how experience becomes story, and story becomes identity.
Dean Gichukie is a creative industry professional. He is a storyteller & builder, specializing in the creation, production and distribution of creative content like music, games, film, Esports & TV. He is currently the CEO & Game Producer at Kunta Content. Kunta Content is an African game studio. Their vision is to make great African games.
Kunta Content is currently working on HIRU a Maasai-inspired 3D Video Game for consoles & PC. They have signed groundbreaking partnerships with Minecraft, Xbox & Microsoft as one of the few studios to do so. We have also received support from Ubisoft, Epic Games & Steam.
Douglas Wilson lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, where he is a Senior Lecturer at the RMIT University School of Design. Doug was previously a co-owner of Die Gute Fabrik, where he worked on a number of commercial videogames including Johann Sebastian Joust, Sportsfriends, Mutazione, and Saltsea Chronicles. These days Doug is collaborating with comedian Melissa McGlensey on a variety of playable theater projects, including their most recent clown show, Mel McGlensey is NORMAL. He is also a co-host of the podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games.
I am a writer, programmer, and fledgling academic based in Cape Town. I initially studied Computer Science and English Literature at university, before working as a game and software developer for four years. I am now doing my Master’s at Stellenbosch University, funded by the Mellon Foundation. I chose to return to studying so that I could do research about how video games can contribute towards global, human efforts to stop climate change. I also foolishly thought studying would give me some free time to make my own games.
Currently, in between writing my dissertation and free-lance programming, I am working haphazardly on a novel and several nonsensical pen-and-paper games. Very occasionally, I even find the time to play video games.
I’m a 33 year old game developer from South Africa. I started off making simple games in Game Maker as a kid and eventually landed my job at 24 Bit Games where I’ve had the opportunity to work on some great games professionally. I still make games in my own time with a particular passion for emergent gameplay and rapid prototyping.
I am a Technical Artist that enjoys solving cross field issues as much as creating dev tools and enabling art direction. The best times are when the work involves a bit of VFX, Programming, Render Pipelines & Art, requiring me to be innovative in delivering visual solutions or realizing visions.
I believe art direction and stylization have a bigger impact on visual appeal of a game than realism. If you are looking for custom lighting, editor and design tools, water behaviors, unorthodox pixel styles, 2D+3D hybrid shading styles, Niagra systems, simple particles, VFX graphs, HLSL I’m the guy for that. Game Design is a core pillar in my skill sets as it feeds the feel of my creations very intimately.
Iris Compiet is a traditional artist and Illustrator from the Netherlands. She is the illustrator of The Dark Crystal Bestiary, winner of the 2020 Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist, and a 2020 nominee for the Chesley Award for Best Gaming Related Illustration.
She is the illustrator of The Star Wars Bestiary vol1, The Labyrinth Bestiary, and most recently, winner of the 2021 Chesley Award for Best Interior Art for The Dark Crystal. Iris’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Spectrum, Infected by Art, ImagineFX, and 3D Total. Some of her other clients include Wizards of the Coast and Netflix, and her art has appeared in publications around the world. In her recent work Faeries of the Faultlines Iris guides readers through a world of fantastical creatures from beyond the veil.
Keevy is known for Genital Jousting (and the game of the same title), a novel you should read (The Unwoven Warrior), and for never reusing a bio.
Kacper is the CEO of Artificer, a Devolver Digital Group studio. Creative Director of MINOS, Sumerian Six, Showgunners; Lead Designer of Phantom Doctrine and Hard West; a game designer with 20 years of industry experience.
I am deeply passionate about creating video games with South African heroes & stories along with helping to grow and create more jobs in the South African video games industry. As the Studio Head of Disputed People Video Games, I lead our amazing team in creating fun & engaging video games for the local and global markets. I hold a MSc in Video Game Enterprise, Production and Design from Birmingham City University in the UK and I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Stellenbosch. My PhD focuses on exploring in what ways South African made games can serve as decolonial spaces for identity formation and representation for South Africans and what insights can Africanfuturism provide us towards the development of African-focused genres in video games. I have over 20 years experience as a senior graphic designer and have won the Promax International Bronze and Promax Africa Silver design awards for my work for a major South African TV channel.
I’m Leia French, from South Africa! I’m a unity developer and junior writer at Spooky Doorway, an indie game studio based in Ireland.
I’m enthralled by narrative games. Stories have always been a way to reimagine our world. They let you, quite literally, walk in someone else’s shoes. They offer insight into who we are and where we stand.
I completed my MA in Game Design to better understand how we could design narrative games for social change – without sacrificing player enjoyment.
I came to realise that, as cultural artefacts, games can often mirror dominant ideologies – unwittingly glorifying militarism, capitalist accumulation, colonization and exclusionary narratives like racism, sexism and xenophobia. But I also found that if games can reflect dominant ideologies, they can be used to subvert them.
As I work on my own games, I strive to remain vigilant about the values I embed in my work — and for whom.
Lewis joined SIE in 2018 and has been part of the Partner Development team since 2022, getting a chance to put his personal passion for indie titles and the games industry to good use. His job involves wearing many hats including scouting, partner guidance and evangelism. Helping to explain how to get up and running with PlayStation, championing and shouting about hidden gems to internal teams and answering all sorts of questions are all things you can find Lewis doing on any given day.
When he’s not working, you’ll likely find him playing a wide variety of games, messing around with playful synthesisers, or on the never-ending quest to find truly excellent sandwiches.
Lisa Adams is the Founder of Citizen Code, a Cape Town–based technology collective that builds inclusive, feminist digital systems for underserved communities across Africa and Asia. Over the past 15 years, she has led projects at the intersection of technology, justice, and culture, from low-data health and education platforms to large-scale AI-driven youth ecosystems. She also serves as Director of Technology & Product at Girl Effect, where she shapes digital strategy and infrastructure for platforms that reach millions of adolescent girls across the Global South.
Named one of Africa’s Inspiring Fifty Women in Tech, Lisa has spoken on global stages including the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), and Games for Change Africa. Her practice is rooted in feminist technology leadership, trauma-informed design, and an insistence that digital futures must be co-authored by the communities they affect.
Lauren Powell is a South African archaeologist, paleoanthropologist, and digital anthropologist whose work bridges deep human history with contemporary digital futures. Her research spans human migration, admixture, and tool-making, tracing the story of how technology has always been part of what makes us human. As a coloured woman from Cape Town, Lauren’s work is also deeply personal: she explores how heritage, displacement, and survival can be honoured and reimagined in new digital forms.
Through Ties, Citizen Code’s heritage initiative, Lauren investigates how games and immersive technologies can act as living archives of memory and resistance, beginning with the erased histories of District Six. By combining archaeological insight with digital anthropology, she challenges how history is recorded and by whom, and explores how play can become a radical act of remembrance.
I am the COO of Nyamakop Games with a background in banking, compliance and Anti-Money Laundering. In a weird turn of events the world of game devs found me and I decided to stay.
My focus is on creating a healthy, inclusive and sustainable working environment that empowers my team to be creative and produce high quality games.
Growing up, Marie could never pick between studying tech and art, so games turned out to be a perfect intersection. After high school, she went straight into game-making education with a bachelor’s in game design and programming and a master’s in project management for games. She has since been a part of lots of different game projects as a Producer and taught project management to game design students for several years. Her favourite part of the job is being a facilitator and cheerleader and getting to witness all the wonderful things the team creates, while taming the chaos a little bit. She’s been told she has way too many crafts, hobbies, and interests, but somehow persists in collecting more of those, as well as colorful tattoos and fox-themed items.
Meg currently scouts for the British games label Team17, helping indie developers secure support and funding for their games as well as providing feedback on ideas and prototypes.
They have been working in games for over a decade with a wildly varied CV working across games audio, project investment, events; following creative opportunities and turning their hand to any craft that sounds interesting and not too techy.
They have been credited on titles such as Dragons Dogma 2, Demon’s Souls, Forza Horizon 5, Anno1800 and plenty of indie gems.
Mike is the Principal Advocate at Unity Technologies, where his passion for educating and inspiring creators can shine. Prior to joining Unity in 2013, he experienced life through the lens of an indie game dev, a university educator, and even briefly as a wedding DJ. A gamer at heart, Mike loves being an Advocate because he gets to build awesome and absurd Unity projects while making game development fun and accessible for everyone. His favorite questions are ones that make him say, “Wow, I have no idea… let’s find out!”
Nella Etkind is a visionary digital storyteller, creative strategist, and member of the Snapchat Lens Network. As one of the first creatives on the African continent experimenting with wearable AR, she is at the frontier of immersive media—where narrative, technology, and humanity collide. Nella is not a content creator; she’s a content alchemist, using gamified storytelling to elevate voices and spark impact. Her work bridges platforms and communities, blending clarity, creativity, and radical honesty. At the intersection of play, politics, and possibility, she’s reimagining what stories can do and how we live inside them.
Patrick LeMieux is a media artist, game designer, and associate professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Davis. His research and teaching engage game studies, media theory, and art practice to explore the material practices and community histories of play, from speedrunning and esports to installation art and alternative control. Alongside writing, his art and games have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1 to Babycastles and BarSK. He is the producer of Every Game in This City, a podcast on the Idle Thumbs Network, and is currently developing a series of small metagames like Triforce, a topological transformation of The Legend of Zelda, and the Octopad, an eight-player controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System. For more information visit patrick-lemieux.com.
Stephanie Boluk is an associate professor who plays, makes, and writes about games in the English Department and Cinema and Digital Media Department at University of California, Davis. Her work incorporates game studies, media theory, and political economy to explore the relationship between leisure and labor in the post-2008 global economy. She is the co-author of Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (2017) with Patrick LeMieux and co-editor of The Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3 (2016). She has published articles in numerous venues ranging from Digital Humanities Quarterly, ROMChip and Leonardo Electronic Almanac to Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and Extrapolation. For more information see stephanieboluk.com.
After studying advertising and multimedia, Richard has been involved in animation & gaming across all spectrums, from creating visual effects for some of South Africa’s top commercials, to directing, designing and animating over 15 gaming prototypes. He founded the studio in 2014 and has played a vital role in overseeing the creative output, especially the inclusion of indie game development in 2023. From a management perspective, Richard has always sought good governance, money management and focused on building a team that has fun together as much as it works well together.”
Henrike Lode (aka Riker) is a narrative game designer obsessed with mechanical storytelling, diegesis, and transformative text. Riker is Game Director at All Day All Night and previously served as Lead Game Designer on Nyamakop’s Relooted. Riker has lectured game design at universities in South Africa and Europe, holds a Master’s degree in Game Design, and have participated in 40 game jams, including co-organizing the Nordic Game Jam for five years.
Ryan is a two-time BAFTA-nominated composer with over twelve years of experience making music for indie games. He’s written for award winning projects like West of Loathing, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, and Wizard With a Gun, and collaborated with developers and musicians from across the globe. His work covers a variety of genres, from jazz and American folk music, to synthwave, chamber music, and more. While he primarily writes for video games, his music has also been featured in short films, commercials, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.
When not making audio, Ryan is likely preparing talks and online content on how to navigate the game industry. He’s spoken at dozens of events–including PAX West in Seattle, The Edinburgh Game Symposium, and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco–where he’s given talks designed to help people start or further their work in games, with an emphasis on emotional and mental health.
Seth S. Smith is a Trinbagonian-American writer and game designer who champions diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging through art, entertainment, and technology.
As an independent game designer, he creates immersive worlds and experiences that authentically reflect faith and celebrate the richness of cultures across the world, while designing systems that foster healthy player-to-player interactions.
He is the founder, curator, and moderator of www.helloworldmixer.com, an inclusive social mixer for anyone seeking to support representation and connection in tech and entertainment. Seth is also the founder, creative director, and resident DJ of @dreambashworld, a vibrant, empowering space for eclectic fans of Afrobeats, Amapiano, Soca, Dancehall, R&B, Hip Hop, gaming, anime, cosplay, and art.
As the DJ and music artist SNDSMTH, Seth blends elements from diverse art forms and experiences to craft unforgettable, immersive vibes in every medium he engages with.
Through his work, Seth designs and curates experiences that bring communities together, amplify underrepresented voices, and create meaningful connections across digital and real-world spaces.
Simon Ratcliffe is a score mixer and producer, film co-producer, and MD of the multi-national Sound & Motion Studios which he founded in 2002.
A music and film background led to his specialisation in game, streaming and film score mixing and supervision with clients including Arenanet, Disney, Netflix and Amazon Prime, and his team has won industry accolades such as Emmy Primetime, FrightNight, MMORPG of the Year, SAFTAs, Songlines, SAMA, and Global Music awards.
With a 14 year background in education and a focus on Dolby Atmos, he has given workshops on immersive mixing and film score production at the AES Immersive Conference, Huddersfield University APL, ACM, Metropolis and UCL London, and has a practice-based masters degree from Hertfordshire University. Simon is an engineer and researcher on the Echo Project focus group on immersive score recording, led by Huddersfield University APL and AIR Studios.
Sean Sutton is a Foley Artist and Audio Engineer at Sound and Motion Studios in Cape Town. A graduate of SAE Institute with a Bachelor’s degree in Sound Engineering, he has contributed to a range of films and series including Blood Legacy, Hunting Jessica Brok, and The Heart is a Muscle.
Within Sound and Motion, Sean’s versatility spans Foley performance, recording, and audio editing — bringing texture and realism to cinematic soundscapes. Beyond film, his passion lies in interactive storytelling and the evolving world of immersive audio for games.
As both a sound professional and avid gamer, Sean bridges the gap between creative audio production and player experience. His work with tools like FMOD and Wwise reflects his drive to explore how sound design shapes emotion, space, and narrative within virtual worlds.
SP is a self-taught pixel and comic artist who used to be a qualified mechanical engineer before delving into the artistic side of life. He’s always been making stuff with friends, from comics to indie games, and is currently working on his own little side project indie game called “Lira the Shieldmaiden”.