Avery Alder is an award-winning tabletop roleplaying game designer living in Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton). For the past twenty years, Avery has been designing games that explore queer identity, relationships, community, precarity, and the end of the world.

Her work includes The Quiet Year, Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, Ribbon Drive, and Going For Broke. Her love of game design has also led her into teaching, workshop facilitation, and developmental consulting.

Kevin Chancey is the Publishing Director and Co-Founder at Gambit Digital. 

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Kevin's background is in communications and video editing which led him to starting his own indie marketing agency for the past eight years. Now at Gambit, he's bringing that expertise with him. He's got a catalogue of over 10 released indie games, and has even done some mocap for The Caribou Trail and his likeness can be spotted in Roots of Yggdrasil.

For marketing folks you will also recognize Kevin for his marketing retreat, Proxima, that he runs in the summer!

Jamin Smith is the founder of Pantaloon; a newsletter, game label and home for misfits. Jamin is a veteran of game publishing, with two decades spent in brand and marketing roles, as well as two solo-developed indie games brought to market

Christopher Wulf is the senior business development manager at narrative games publisher 'Fellow Traveller'.

In his role, he is responsible for pursuing both revenue & visibility opportunities for the games portfolio of the Australia-based publisher.
 

Additionally, he works as the senior business & event manager at The Triple-i Initiative, a games showcase created by developers, with a clear motto: no ads, no hosts, just games!

Claire is an experienced publishing, production and game development leader, spanning the indie, AA and AAA space.

Claire has over a decade of commercial, studio, event and strategic management, successfully launching multiple games.

Claire is a co-founder of Lumo Cooperative, a new type of publisher centered around helping game developers build a sustainable business; balancing commercial success with artistic vision.

Josh Nilson is Métis from Willow River, BC. He is the founder of Maskwa Games which has made the metislife.ca project.

Maskwa Investments focuses on early-stage seed funding and advisement with a focus on Indigenous tech businesses.

Prior to that he was a founder at East Side Games (ESG), making mobile games like Trailer Park Boys, The Office, Ru Paul Drag Race Superstar and more. Josh has been working in tech since 2002 and works in the technology and interactive media spaces and will always stop for pugs.

Meric is the RPG director for Plotweaver and lead writer for the Cosmere RPG at Brotherwise Games, a California-based board game and roleplaying game company. TTRPG development was the perfect trap for Meric, combining his various loves of writing, storytelling, community building, and production editing. He’s been a game store owner, completed a professional writing degree at MacEwan University, and worked as a marketing manager for over a decade.

In the TTRPG industry, Meric worked as a freelance designer on games including the Cosmere RPG, The Expanse, Fantasy AGE, Achtung! Cthulhu, and Star Trek Adventures, and he’s streamed actual plays for over five years as Massive Damage Adventures and Sky Hammer Press. 

Pinki Li 顏婷妍 (she/her) is an independent dance artist, writer, and facilitator based on the unsurrendered ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her practice squats at the intersection of diasporic dissonance, somatics, and technology-induced melancholy. Pinki is an award-winning Narrative Designer at sunset visitor studio, which released the critically-acclaimed 1000xRESIST. Pinki is also the Co-Artistic Director of interdisciplinary company, Hong Kong Exile, and a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®, a body-centred and trauma-aware approach to the voice.

Alex is an Indigenous game developer from Edmonton, a recent NAIT Digital Media and IT graduate, and currently works remotely as a Game Engineer at Maskwa Games. Maskwa Games is a Vancouver-based studio that creates Indigenous and Metis experiences on ROBLOX as an accessible and engaging way for Indigenous youth across Canada to connect with and learn about both their languages and Cultures. We aim to empower 1000 Indigenous digital interactive creators in Canada over the next two years, and we've made strides toward this goal through in-person training both on and off reserve. Connecting youth with Indigenous peers in their own communities allows us to provide effective and accessible training. "Through my last year with Maskwa Games, I have been able to connect with Indigenous culture, history and communities in a way that I did not think I was capable of, In Maskwa Games' journey to empower 1000 Indigenous creators, I found myself becoming one of them very early on, even being able to support myself and my peers here in Edmonton along the way."

Carina is the Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Simply Sweet Games. She is a video game company founder and entrepreneur, game designer and producer with over 17 years of experience.

Her career includes philanthropy for Diversity and Equity in games, in addition to inclusive design and production, working on projects ranging from indie games to massive AAA titles. She has shipped products onto multiple platforms with renowned teams such as EA, Microsoft, and Unity, and has successfully launched games on Gen4 and Gen5 platforms.

At Simply Sweet Games, Carina leads the creative direction and production efforts, focusing on delivering polished, high-depth premium games that appeal to diverse audiences.

Kaelin is a Métis writer, designer, and professional procrastinator who's spent the last decade or so wrangling story chaos into something that (usually) makes sense. He has worked on everything from AAA games to indie projects - the latter of which he finds himself currently embroiled in with his team at Studio Reset. He thinks he's funnier than he is.

Hope Docking is a game producer and QA lead based in Edmonton, co-founder of Cozy Comet Games Workers Cooperative. With credits on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, she specializes in cross-team collaboration, testing strategy, and inclusive development. Hope was also an organizing member of one of Canada’s first video game worker unions (under UFCW 401), where she contributed to communications and outreach. 

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Now that she's escaped AAA game development she's focused on ways we can build a better, more sustainable games industry together.

Chris Cooke is a game designer with a decade of experience in the video games industry. He self-published his first board game, UNSCREWED, via Kickstarter in 2024, and has just launched his second one, Headway.

This means that he designs games during the day, then designs more games at night. Some people would say he has a problem.

Kevin Douangmany is the founder of The Resplendent Cave, a professional gamemastering service provider in Edmonton. His work includes planning and organizing large-scale D&D events for conventions and fundraisers as well as writing and illustrating adventure modules.

Before entering the games industry, Kevin served in the Canadian Armed Forces as a materials technician, acted as a host for a coworking space, and worked as a motion capture actor at NAIT.

He is a cycling enthusiast and cat parent. He enjoys management games such as Cities Skylines, Railroad Empire 2 and Planet Coaster. Victoria Park is his favourite park in Edmonton.

Isla Medina is a volunteer with the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) Edmonton and has been helping out with UX in Play for over a year now.

She's interested in UX research design and data analysis, particularly when it comes to game development. Isla is currently pursuing the Digital Experience Design program at MacEwan University, having recently graduated with a BSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta. Outside of her studies, Isla enjoys playing sandbox and platformer games!

Tyler Anderson owns 3D Printersaur Games, a newly formed boardgame publication company in Edmonton. Over the last 10 years he's been involved in boardgame development from playtesting, designing boardgames, helping others create concepts, and Kickstarter campaigns.

Using his 19 years of engineering experience has allowed him to understand manufacturing of boardgames while also creating 3D printed games for unique ideas.

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Leiss Hoffman (she/her) aka Lacey is a composer, guitarist and coffee connoisseur from Edmonton, Alberta. Her decade-long career spans indie and AA sized teams, such as Digital Eclipse’s Barbie Rewind (2026) and Ellpeck Games’ Tiny Life (2023). 

More recently she has started studying both Wwise and FMOD to implement dynamic music systems for future clients.

In 2025 she played guitar in Thennecan, a video game music band, performing across Edmonton and Vancouver.

Outside of the studio, she's either sinking countless hours into her back catalogue or roleplaying in TTRPGs with friends.

Megan Wu currently volunteers with IxDF, supporting UX research and playtesting initiatives for indie game studios in Edmonton while also developing her own games.

Her primary focuses are UI/UX design and illustration for video games, with an emphasis on creating gaging and meaningful experiences.

Megan recently graduated from MacEwan University with a Bachelor of Design, where she explored how game development can be used as a tool for positive change. As she continues her work in the industry and with IDF, she hopes to further explore how game developers can help create a better world, and better games, through the design of meaningful interactive works.

Alyx Bui (they/them) is an Edmonton-based activist, filmmaker, writer, and Ennie award winning tabletop role-playing game writer, designer and gamemaster. Their stories expand narratives divergent from the mainstream and centre the representation of QTBIPOC folx. Currently, they are a programmer with the Canadian Film Festival and dabble in board game design. 

Their work can be found at Magpie Games: Cartel, Wet Ink Games: Jiangshi Blood in the Banquet, CBC: Coffee to the People, HitPoint Press: Chinese Stories We Tell Ourselves, DMsGuild: The Great Zodiac Race, Unbreakable Pathways: Fly Me to the Moon, Paizo’s Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia Character and World Guides (Ennie for Best setting, 2024) and Draconic Codex (2026). 

Yiannis Chroniaris is the co-founder and lead technical artist for Eat the Sun; Shoot the Moon, an Edmonton indie studio hard at work on their upcoming release Keeps. If he's not hunched over his computer anxiously placing and re-drawing 2 pixels for 20 minutes, he's up in a classroom teaching young, bright-eyed future game developers how to do the same.

Yiannis believes in an evolved games industry, built for and accountable to the people who work hard to make the wheels turn

Jaie Tesiorna leads the art direction for Eat the Sun; Shoot the Moon's projects, more recently focused on the cast and environment for their upcoming project Keeps.

In between creating art set in the Southeast Asian inspired world of Ormauk and building the ETSSTM community, he is usually trying not to get lost in the backcountry trails around the Canadian Rockies

Jupiter Bradley is a game dev based in Edmonton Alberta, and is the president and a founder of Area 42 Games. Jupiter is currently working on The Meaning of Auri with Area 42 Games, with a shortly upcoming planned release.

Their main goal is to spread the word on the value of micro-development: making small micro-games start-to-finish for yourself at the same time that you are doing your professional games work. Importantly, they focus on how it can benefit your artistic practice as a developer, which has benefits throughout your entire work.

They have released over 10 games on itch.io, each following the micro-development practice.

Nova Willgress is a game developer based in Edmonton, and is a co-founder of Area 42 Games. Within the studio, they help tell Area 42 Games’ stories both as the Lead Writer, and Social Media Manager. While studying at University of Alberta, they released several game projects, and even won a couple awards for their work. After graduating, they have focused more on developing Area 42’s upcoming game, The Meaning of Auri.

During the beginning of this year, Nova participated in the first ever cohort of Baby Ghosts Alberta, alongside their studio. With the guidance from this program and the peer supports, they built upon their skills as a studio member, and began solidifying the foundation of Area 42 Games as a worker co-op.

After spending most of their life playing video games unprofessionally, Nova is excited to continue absorbing as much as he possibly can from those more experienced than them in the gaming industry, and building upon their future career—and maybe sharing a few of his own secrets here and there.