Bernard Francois
Shaily Menon, Ph.D
Kenneth Thompson
Near the end of 2009, in Belgium, Bernard decided to combine his passion for game design and game programming by starting the first company dedicated to the development of prototypes using game technology: PreviewLabs.
PreviewLabs turns ideas into interactive prototypes, allowing its clients to evaluate concepts early on. This service enables them to explore more different concepts and ultimately helps them to be more successful developing new products.
In the first twelve years of PreviewLabs, Bernard oversaw the development of prototypes for over 200 different concepts, for clients including Walt Disney Imagineering and Yale University, but also a large amount of startups seeking to develop new products. In 2016, Bernard established PreviewLabs’ US office, which is now based in Guilford, Connecticut.
Bernard is also the chairman of FLEGA, the Flemish Games Association, and founder of GameDevCT, an organization aiming to connect and grow the games industry and games industry ecosystem in Connecticut.
My experience in academic leadership includes my current roles as Dean, College of Arts and Sciences and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at the University of New Haven; Dean, College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia; ACE Fellow in the President’s Office at San Francisco State University; and previously as Associate Dean and Department Chair at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. My teaching and research have been in environmental ethics, conservation biology, global change, systems dynamics, and spatial modeling. I enjoy strategic visioning and design thinking, serving as a catalyst to help faculty launch of new interdisciplinary programs such as Game Design and Interactive Media at the University of New Haven, and engaging with community partners. In my previous role, I fostered partnerships with Global Philadelphia and Mural Arts, Campus Philly, the Barnes Foundation, and a biotech startup, Navrogen, which is creating innovative solutions in humoral immuno-oncology. Our partnerships at the University of New Haven include those with the Yale Prison Education Initiative, BioCT, and GameDevCT. I serve on the boards of two national organizations: Asian Pacific Americans for Higher Education (APAHE) and Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS). I was recently invited to join the GameDevCT board and am looking forward to working collaboratively on regional and state opportunities in the context of Game Design and Interactive Media; Game jams, mixers and other networking opportunities for students and industry; workforce development; and contributing to GameDevCT’s mission for fostering growth in the games industry and game development community in the state creating an ecosystem in the region for innovation in serious games and games for entertainment.
Matt Fantastic
Jake Bayer
Kelly Mark
Matt primarily does freelance game design, development, and art direction for publishers around the world as the Creative Director of Forever Stoked, the studio they founded over a decade ago. They also own a game shop/library (Elm City Games), are sometimes an adjunct professor of game design, publish indie games, books, zines, vinyl records, and other creative weirdness with killjoy, founded the New Haven Game Makers Guild, are on the board of the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), the Tabletop Mentorship Program, and GameDev CT, organize Fantasticon and the Connecticut Festival of Indie Games, and do consulting/fixing across the game industry as well as for corporate, NGO, and institutional clients like Netflix and Yale.
Jake has been in the gaming industry since 2011. His journey started with downloading 3D Gamestudio before switching to Unity a few months later. Along the way, he has worked on multiple projects. He has also showcased his work at numerous game festivals, including the Boston Festival of Indie Games and its Connecticut variant, CT FIG.
After graduating from Manchester Community College with an Associate of Science in Computer Game Design in 2019, Jake briefly joined the startup ActiveScaler Inc. Prior to joining Max Gaming Studios (maxgamingstudios.com) as a Senior Unity Developer, Jake primarily ran an independent game development business called Closed Umbrella Games (closedumbrellagames.com).
Jake is among the founding board members of GameDevCT, and has since helped organize numerous events throughout Connecticut.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakebayer/
https://twitter.com/JakeBayer3
Kelly is relatively new to the game development scene; what began as a simple Covid hobby rapidly turned into a fierce passion, something she would spend all her free time doing for months on end. This passion brought her early success in her career, and she is currently finishing up a project with Motive Labs, a company which focuses on technology that can help people in various ways. For this project, she is creating a mobile app of games that are designed to test and track vision and help prevent vision loss for its players. Kelly loves the idea of merging games with education, health, and wellness, and hopes to create more games that help people in the future. She also freelances and offers game development services through her studio, tinyzigzag, and through Upwork. She knows several programming languages, and is a graduate of Flatiron School, which is one of the most highly rated coding bootcamps for software development.
As a board member of GameDevCT, she hopes to expand the local community and bring more people from all over Connecticut into the group, and to try to find new ways of keeping the community connected.
Amy Singer
Gregory Garvey
Amy Singer is a gameplay programmer at Proletariat Inc, a Blizzard Entertainment Studio, who has been working in the games industry since March of 2019. After graduating from Quinnipiac University with a bachelor’s of science in computer science in 2014, she worked as a software engineer in Connecticut while pursuing game development in her free time making games with the Unity engine. While working on her own games, she sought out local game development communities in Connecticut and New York City to learn and grow as a game developer, and get feedback on her own work. Eventually she helped form GameDevCT after meeting some of the other founding members and has since been a board member helping plan in person events and managing their virtual space in Gather Town.
In March of 2019, Amy was finally able to turn her hobby of game development into a career when she was offered a job as a gameplay programmer at the independent game studio Labrodex, where she became acquainted with the Unreal engine. There she worked on some VR titles such as Scraper: First Strike, Scraper: Gauntlet, and Humans 101. After working at Labrodex she did some contract work for the game studio Slipgate Ironworks where she contributed to their dark fantasy, first person shooter GRAVEN. She then got hired full time as a gameplay programmer at Proletariat Inc, working on their spell casting battle royale, Spellbreak.
Today Proletariat is a Blizzard Entertainment studio, so now Amy is lending her talents to Blizzard, working on their wildly popular MMORPG World of Warcraft.
Amy is currently based in New Jersey, and even though she doesn’t live in Connecticut anymore, she lives close enough to help organize and attend some of GameDevCT’s events. Connecticut is the state she grew up in, and she’s always dreamed of Connecticut, and the northeast in general, becoming more of an active hub for game developers. Living in the tri-state for most of her life, the games industry always felt to her like such a mysterious, far away land she could never hope to learn about. She wants to change that, and help foster local game development communities so that other local developers don’t ever feel the way she once did, and they can see a future for themselves in games without having to pick up roots and move far away.
And as a trans woman in the games industry, she feels strongly about creating safe spaces for aspiring game developers, and wants to challenge harmful trends in the industry to make it a much more welcoming place for everyone.
You can find out more about her work on portfolio here: https://sites.google.com/view/amy-singer
Garvey holds the appointment of Professor of Game Design & Development at Quinnipiac University where he founded the Game Design & Development Program in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts in 2010. He is currently a Fellow of the People’s United Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PUCIE) at Quinnipiac. He has also served as Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Associate Professor of Interactive Digital Design (now GID), and as Visiting Fellow in the Arts at Quinnipiac (1999-2001).
Other appointments include Associate Artist of the Digital Media Center for the Arts at Yale University (now the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media). Prior to joining Quinnipiac University, he was Chair of the Department of Design Art at Concordia University in Montrèal and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Montrèal Design Institute. From 1983-85 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Prior to his academic appointments he worked in the games industry starting in companies such as Parker Brothers (Beverly, MA) and Spinnaker Software (Cambridge, MA).