game-development
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Konstantina Psoma Turned a Cathedral-Sized Headache Into Kaedim
A crashed laptop, a stubborn student project and six Y Combinator applications led from Athens to San Francisco. Her more useful lesson was simpler: when the AI fell short, put an artist in the loop.
Frederic Descamps Keeps Building Games That Let Other People Build
A $10-an-hour support job opened the door. Two acquired startups and one creator platform later, Frederic Descamps is still betting that the interesting part of a game begins when players get their hands on it.
Ben Kim Built an AI Game Engine. Then the Engine Became the Test.
Nitrode began by trying to make games easier to build. Ben Kim and his team discovered a thornier problem hiding inside the engine: AI still struggles to understand worlds that move.
Anthony Leung Bet on Belonging - Then Built a World Around It
The former Riot development director made a counterintuitive wager: online games could feel less like contests and more like neighborhoods. Palia became the eight-year test of that idea.
Harold Ryan Is Rebuilding His Big Idea About Making Games
The former Bungie chief built ProbablyMonsters around stable careers and giant games. A harsher market forced a smaller, more revealing second draft.
Dragos-Florin Stanculescu Wants Your Digital Face to Feel Like You
After 13 years making games, the Holotech co-founder turned a webcam, a digital mask and one stubborn idea about expression into FaceRig, then rebuilt the premise as Animaze.
Andy Tsen Built a World. Then He Built the Tools to Make the Next One.
After Zenith topped Steam and Quest, its defining problem appeared after launch. Andy Tsen turned that lesson into Aura, an AI assistant designed around the unglamorous work of shipping games.
Vatsal Bhardwaj
Vatsal Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Jabali.ai, a Los Altos startup building a no-code, generative-AI game engine that lets anyone create and publish video games from text prompts. A 20-year product and engineering executive, he helped build the Oculus App Store at Meta (which generated $1.5B+ in cumulative revenue), led AWS Game Tech, ran Studios at Storm8, and served as Chief Product Officer at Skillz. In 2024 Jabali raised a $5M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures with Sapphire Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund.
Ben Liu
Ben Liu is the CEO of Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based mobile entertainment company backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital. After joining as COO in 2011 and becoming CEO in 2012, he has led the company's flagship titles — the interactive storytelling platform Episode (with 25 million+ registered creators) and the real-time 3D strategy game War Dragons — while overseeing $155 million in total fundraising, mostly from Tencent. A Stanford double-degree and MBA graduate, Liu brings a rare hybrid background spanning investment banking, Disney strategy, EA mobile product management, and social gaming before betting on the mobile-first future of entertainment.
Julian Park
Julian Park is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bezi, a San Francisco-based AI assistant for Unity game developers that helps with debugging, code generation, shader creation, and prototyping through deep project-level context. A UC Berkeley computer science grad, Park cut his teeth at Facebook building WebGL design tools and then at Oculus leading VR multitasking and UI framework projects before co-founding Bezi in 2021. The company raised $13M across Seed and Series A rounds, with Benchmark leading the Series A, and has evolved from a collaborative 3D design tool into a powerful AI coding companion purpose-built for Unity pipelines.
Joseph Kim
Joseph Kim is the CEO and co-founder of LILA Games, a venture-backed mobile game studio headquartered in Bengaluru, India, building Project Black - an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. With a career spanning two decades across Gaia Interactive, FunPlus (King of Avalon), Demiurge Studios, SEGA Networks, and NBCUniversal, Kim brings rare publishing-to-studio expertise to one of gaming's most competitive genres. Backed by $12.8M from BITKRAFT Ventures and top gaming angels, he's on a mission to prove India can be the next great hub for world-class game development.
Joshua Lu
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Babar Ahmed
Babar Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan's pioneering independent mobile game studio behind 1 billion+ downloads and global chart-toppers like Hexa Sort. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who quit a Silicon Valley circuit engineering career to return to Pakistan and build a gaming company from the ground up, he has transformed a startup funded by his father into a 150-person studio with 2 million daily active users, while also co-founding M-Labs (a game development accelerator) and serving as head of strategy at AppLovin's Lion Studios.
Tommy McGlynn
Tommy McGlynn is a Los Angeles-based engineering manager at Meta's Reality Labs, where he leads the AI Character Platform team building AI-powered characters for the mixed-reality metaverse. A self-taught hacker who cracked an ad referral platform at 12, he went on to design scalable server architectures for Apple's TestFlight, speak on stage at WWDC for three consecutive years, and author the Oculus Developer Hub launch. He bridges design thinking and deep engineering - from Flash games and real-time multiplayer systems to VR developer tooling and interactive AI agents.