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Rosie Ball
Rosie is the Brand Designer for independent games developer and publisher Chucklefish, working across all Chucklefish games to define their visual marketing.
At various times Rosie has been a Game Designer, Artist and Producer at both Chucklefish and Disney Interactive in the last 8 years since taking part in Dare to be Digital herself back in 2011. She has worked on titles such as Starbound, Wargroove and Witchbrook, and with IP such as Star Wars, Disney Junior and Disney Fairies.
She was recently named among the 100 Most Influential Women In Games by gamesindustry.biz and is an active speaker within the educational sector. Rosie is also a member of the Women In Games Advisory Board and a Limit Break Mentor.
Chris Eaves
Chris is a video games programmer with over a decade of industry experience. Currently working at Sumo Digital in Sheffield where he’s been employed as a senior programmer for most of that time.
Chris has worked on lots of games throughout his career including plenty of SEGA titles like Virtual Tennis, Sega Rally and his personal favourite Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed.
His most recently released title was Crackdown 3. When he’s not ripping it up at Sumo Digital, you will possibly find him down his local pub or at home tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or some other emulation device!
Jess Hider
Trained in animation, with a background of pixel art at 4J Studios, and community management as part of the Unreal Engine team, Jess draws on all of her previous experiences as a Technical Designer at Rare.
Alongside her work, when she’s not out making friends with the local wildlife or baking nerdy cakes, she’s supporting young people into video games careers through her STEM & VGA work.
Jess returns for the second year as a Dare Academy judge and is an Abertay University graduate.
You can also find her on Twitter with @JessHider
Neil Holmes
An industry veteran with more than 25 years as programmer, producer and technical manager in the games industry, Neil returns for his second year as a Dare Academy judge. Neil has developed a diverse range of titles from huge F2P mobile hits to AAA console games. In his current role as a Developer Partner Manager at Xbox Neil assists developers from across Europe to bring their games to Xbox One and Windows 10.
Alastair Brown
Alastair has worked at Rebellion for 5 years now, 2 of those as QA staff before moving departments in 2016 to work as a level designer on Strange Brigade. As that project evolved, he has become much more heavily involved in the narrative design. Overseeing the games Narrator & Character dialogue systems, before then spending the last year working on Zombie Army 4: Dead War.
A former Dare to be Digital participant from the class of 2012, Alastair is really looking forward to seeing what this year’s teams have created!
