Speakers at the Develop Conference are working in the development community from the largest companies to the smallest studio from across Europe.

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David Amor, Relentless Software
Session: Designing new kinds of games for the masses
Track: Coding · Panel, 60 minutes

David Amor has been working in videogame development and publishing for sixteen years, starting at Mindscape Software in 1989 and moving to Electronic Arts as a Producer three years later. He has worked on over 30 products including games in the Ultima, Wing Commander, Theme Park, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper and Harry Potter franchises. David set up Computer Artworks’ Brighton studio in 2001 and as Studio Manager created products for Sony, Atari and Bam.

In 2003, David founded Relentless Software with Andrew Eades and has successfully shipped two products for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in his role as Creative Director.

Paulina Bozek , Sony Computer Entertainment
Session: Designing new kinds of games for the masses
Track: Coding · Panel, 60 minutes

Paulina Bozek, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Paulina Bozek is a senior producer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s (SCEE) London Studio. Her recent work has included producing the innovative and highly successful SingStar series. Paulina started her career in games at UbiSoft in Montreal, Canada, working in PR & Communications. She then moved into development in a project management role for UbiSoft’s online gaming portal: GameLoft.com. She joined SCEE London Studio in January 2003, working in the prototype departments and was appointed as producer for SingStar shortly afterwards. She holds a Bachelor's degree in cultural studies and an MSc in media & communications from the London School of Economics. Paulina was awarded the BAFTA Interactive New Talent Award in 2004. SingStar was awarded the BAFTA for Originality in 2005.

Jeremy Chatelaine, Electronic Arts
Session: Software engineering: Games programming for large scale projects
Track: Coding · Lecture, 60 minutes

Jeremy Chatelaine is a senior software engineer working for Electronic Arts (UK Studio) and is currently part of the Harry Potter team.

Jeremy also worked for other prestigious companies such as Argonaut and Lionhead where he had the opportunity to work on great titles such as Black and White. Passionate about his work, he enjoys challenging people as well as being challenged and loves bringing innovative ideas to life.

Some-time game designer, part-time producer, always a writer and often asleep, Ste Curran is many things to many people. Many of those things are pleasant! Currently freelance, he has written two books and is working on a third. In his spare time he writes at industry whine-blog www.thetriforce.com, where he concerns himself with videogames, attractive girls and Swedish music.

What if, instead of having to spend days resolving some particular design problem you could be ‘inspired’ instead by a solution another game has already found? What if that game wasn’t a triple AAA, 98% classic which everyone else has already stripped bare of ideas? What if it was something odd, or overlooked, or otherwise actually pretty rotten that meant those ideas were still fresh? And what if you didn’t even need to go to the effort of playing them yourself, but could rely on Margaret Robertson, deputy editor of Edge, to fill you in on some of the neatest design shortcuts of the last year.

What if, instead of having to spend days resolving some particular design problem you could be ‘inspired’ instead by a solution another game has already found? What if that game wasn’t a triple AAA, 98% classic which everyone else has already stripped bare of ideas? What if it was something odd, or overlooked, or otherwise actually pretty rotten that meant those ideas were still fresh? And what if you didn’t even need to go to the effort of playing them yourself, but could rely on Margaret Robertson, deputy editor of Edge, to fill you in on some of the neatest design shortcuts of the last year.

Hugues Giboire, Ninja Theory
Session: Software engineering: Games programming for large scale projects
Track: Coding · Lecture, 60 minutes

Hugues Giboire began working as a freelancer in 1992, operating in a variety of different domains including architecture, video, cinema, advertisement and design. In 1996 he followed his passion for games by joining Kalisto as a 3D artist. He worked there for three years contributing to most of the titles produced in-house including Dark Earth and Nightmare Creatures.

In 2001, Hugues joined Just Add Monsters where he took on the role of Lead Artist on Kung Fu Chaos. He was responsible for the art style and the art team coordination. Now at Ninja Theory, Hugues is the Art Director on the PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword and is pushing next-gen visuals and tools to dizzying new levels. His technical and artistic prowess is countered by his terrible taste in heavy-metal jazz.

Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive
Session: I’m with the brand: Developers as the stars
Track: Coding · Panel, 60 minutes

Miles Jacobson is managing director of Sports Interactive (SI), the sports management simulation specialist, originally the creators of the Championship Manager series of football management games and now the company behind the new smash hit football management simulation, Football Manager. Having enjoyed a successful career in the music industry (with Food Records and Universal Music), Miles transferred a long-standing love affair with Sports Interactive and gaming in general into a career change when he joined SI in 1997, initially as business consultant before assuming his current role in 2001. He gave up his other interests and became full time at Sports Interactive in 2002. He was also responsible for acting as a music consultant on more than 30 computer games, including the first 3 Gran Turismo European releases. 2004 will be recognised as a watershed in SI’s development: the company ended its long-standing relationship with the game publisher Eidos and, as a result, no longer has any involvement with Championship Manager. Instead, the SI team incorporated its award-winning code and database into a new game, Football Manager 2005, which was released on November 4th by SI’s new publisher SEGA (immediately becoming that company’s fastest-selling game since records began). The latest version of the game, Football Manager 2006, was released on October 21st 2005, and became the second fastest selling PC game of all time in the UK, with over 100,000 units sold over the counter in the first weekend. In addition, SI has taken its expertise into new fields for the first time, with the release of its first non-football game (the ice hockey management simulation NHL Eastside Hockey Manager, which was first released in July 2004) and the announcement of its first baseball game (Out Of The Park Baseball, due in 2006). They have also recently announced that the Football Manager brand will be coming to PSP & Xbox 360 in early 2006, and have a few other announcements up their sleeve for titles to be released in 2006 and beyond. Miles lives in North London and is currently carrying out a study into the long-term effects of sleep deprivation.

Chris Keegan , Climax Handheld

Session: Production Masterclass
Track: Production · Lecture, 60 minutes

Chris Keegan has been in the games industry for over ten years and since first, reluctantly, stepping up to such high-level languages as C and C++ rose through the programming ranks to the giddy heights of technical director before finally yielding to the inevitable and taking the role of VP of development at Climax's Handheld Studio in London. Chris' first published title after some years of working on projects that never saw the light of day was B-17 - The Mighty Eighth (PC-Zone Readers' Awards "Flight Simulation of the Year" 2001). These aborted projects, although frustrating, afforded Chris excellent first-hand experience working on failing large scale software projects. Such experience these days is vital. Since joining Climax Chris has enjoyed sticking his oar in, asking awkward questions and generally "getting in the way". As well as guiding technology development, Chris is involved with the development of project management processes to ensure that games developers never have to suffer under the yoke of the endless crunch whilst at the same time are able to create innovative and exciting games.

Nicholas Lovell , Lodestar Partners

Session: Money for Non-Suits
Track: Business · Lecture, 60 minutes

Nicholas Lovell is Managing Director of Lodestar Partners, a corporate finance firm that focuses exclusively on the electronic games industry. He has over a decade of experience advising companies in the media and technology sectors on buying and selling business and raising capital. Recent clients include Blitz, Codemasters, Deutsche Bank, Eidos, Talpa Capital and Vis entertainment.

Nicholas was Deutsche Bank's Internet Research Analyst from 1999 - 2000, during which time Deutsche Bank was ranked as #1 for its understanding of the New Economy.

Nicholas was Chief Financial Officer of ShopSmart.com, a comparison shopping engine funded by advertising and affiliate marketing from 2000-2001, during which time the company raised a significant amount of venture capital and secured investment from AOL and Wal-Mart.

Nicholas is currently Chairman of GameShadow (www.gameshadow.com), the patching and updating engine. GameShadow was started in 2003, and has raised one round of angel investment.

Nicholas is also a Trustee of the MusicSpace Trust, a national charity that provides music therapy to adults and children throughout the UK.

Track: Business · Panel, 60 minutes

Chris Lee has over 12 years of experience in interactive entertainment. Following a degree in Manufacturing Engineering and Operations Management, Chris became one of the first virtual reality research and applications engineers in the mid-1990s, contracting throughout the world for companies such as Superscape and Silicon Graphics. This led to the opportunity to enter the games industry working on products in the ‘Nintendo Dream Team’ solution for Nintendo64, with companies such as Rare, DMA Design & Software Creations. In 1998 Chris was one of the first employees of NxN Software, joining to build their worldwide sales and marketing organisation. Over the next 2 years he and the NxN team established their product Alienbrain as the de-facto standard asset management solution within the games industry.

From mid-2000, Chris spent over 5 years as Vice President of Criterion Software, running the worldwide RenderWare division; managing sales, marketing, and field engineering disciplines throughout Criterion’s European and North American offices. During this time he signed franchises such as GTA, Tony Hawk, Call of Duty and Mortal Kombat to use RenderWare and grew the user base from 2% to 25% of all console games in development. Criterion was acquired by Electronics Arts in October 2004.
In January 2006, Chris accepted the role of Commercial Director at FreeStyleGames, one of a new wave of groundbreaking European independent development studios. Chris takes on responsibility for the strategic growth of the business in an exciting year where FreeStyle will launch their first product; an innovative and orignal IP on PlayStation®2 and PlayStation®Portable.

Peter Molynuex, Lionhead Studios
Design by democracy: How to keep your vision - while taking on board everyone else's

Track: Design · Lecture, 60 minutes

Peter Molyneux is one of the best-known names in the international world of computer games. He co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987 and created a new genre of computer games, “ the god game” with the release of Populous. Since then Peter has been responsible for a string of massive selling games including Powermonger, Theme Park, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper. Cumulative sales of his games are now approaching the ten million mark worldwide. In 1997 Peter left Bullfrog Productions to form a new games development company Lionhead Studios. The company has released two games Black & White in 2001 and Fable in 2004, cumulative sales are already over 3 million copies. Autumn 2005 saw the release of Black & White 2 (PC), The Movies (PC) and Fable The Lost Chapters (PC and Xbox) Lionhead now numbers over 200 employees and is working on four new games.  Peter is recognised as one of the computer games industry’s most articulate and eloquent speakers on the subject of the development of computer games. He has recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Abertay and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. Peter was also awarded an OBE in the 2005 New Years Honours List for services to the computer video games industry.

Margaret Robertson, Edge magazine
Session: Design DNA: 10 new game designs ideas from the past 12 months worth stealing
Track: Design · Lecture, 60 minutes

After a glitteringly unsuccessful career as a medieval historian, Margaret made the decision of turning my interest in games from time-consuming liability into a job opportunity and shifted into freelance writing.  Since starting at Edge Margaret's written for a wide range of game and mainstream magazines, helped run the Edinburgh games festival and never missed a change to bang on about Magic Pengel.

Ken Perlin , New York University
Session: Animating Emotion
Track: Coding · Lecture, 60 minutes

Ken Perlin a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, and founding director of the Media Research Laboratory, also directed the NYU Center for Advanced Technology from 1994-2004. His research interests include graphics, animation, and multimedia. In January 2004 he was the featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2002 he received the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU. In 1997 he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television. In 1991 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 1986, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University in 1979. He was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY from 1984 through 1987. Prior to that, from 1979 to 1984, he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc., Elmsford, NY, where the first feature film he worked on was TRON. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.

Jonathan Smith, Traveler's Tales
Session: Money for Non-Suits
Track: Business · Lecture, 60 minutes

Jonathan Smith, Travellers Tale A former games journalist and editor at Future Publishing, Jonathan Smith is development director at TT Games, where he was responsible for the production of LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game. Jonathan’s currently working on a number of new titles, all of which promise to be amazing.

Kenny Young , Sony Computer Entertainment
Session: Recreating Reality
Track: Coding Format · Lecture, 60 minutes

Kenny Young is a sound designer at SCEE's London Studio. In the past couple of years he has worked on eight titles including The Getaway Black Monday, Fired Up, EyeToy Kinetic and 24. Prior to this he studied music technology as an undergraduate and gained an MA, with distinction, in sound design. He has given guest lectures on interactive audio at GDCE, the University of Edinburgh, Leeds College of Music and Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies. Kenny recently set up the website gamesound.org as a resource for those wishing to learn more about sound for games.