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After having worked on many notable titles and franchises such as Agents of Mayhem, Saints Row, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Dark Age of Camelot, Air Warrior, and Planetside, Jeff ended a three-decade video game development career in December 2021. He hasn't gone far, though. He now works on the Omniverse engine and developer tools at NVIDIA, progressing from a senior software developer to managing a team of engineers. Along with bringing his Technical Artist skills to NVIDIA's innovative real-time 3D collaboration and simulation system, Jeff helps coordinate the TA community on Tech-Artists.org. He is a member of the GDC Advisory Board and sits on a curriculum advisory board for Purdue University. Every year at GDC he hosts the Technical Art Bootcamp and the Technical Art Roundtables. He was awarded an Autodesk 3ds Max Master award in 2007 and was named an Outstanding Alum of Purdue University's School of Technology in 2012.

For over 15 years, Jeff Hesser worked on video games like Rock Band and Fortnite Festival at Harmonix and then Epic Games as a 3D Art Generalist with a focus on Gameplay/Interaction Prototypes and Environment Art/Level Design. Jeff is also an accomplished figure sculptor, and his sculptures have been featured in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, the Dahesh Museum, the National Sculpture Society and the Parrish Art Museum. In addition to his work as an artist, Jeff has more than a decade of experience as a teacher and received the Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the past decade of GDC's Jeff has brought together his background as a game dev, teacher and sculptor to give talks and run roundtables on effective ways to give and receive feedback. He now runs workshops at schools and companies on this topic. In GDC summits, he's delivered talks about innovative ways to create gaze-reactive UI in virtual reality (VR) and integrate VR with public spaces. Jeff has also explored creative ways to use interactive, real-time rendering outside the context of video games. As a founding member of Secret Portal, he worked with an interdisciplinary team to create events at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that combined virtual reality with physical spaces. In another side project called Circle, he worked with two musicians to design and prototype a zen-like, calming audio-visual experience in VR. As the founder of Slow Monkey, an independent studio developing mindfulness-focused digital tools and transformative, impact-oriented games, he's creating alternatives to traditional engagement loops with slow, deliberate digital interactions and gaming experiences that prioritize presence and slowing down over distraction and speeding up.

Robin-Yann Storm is a freelance Tool UX & Workflow Designer. In the past he has worked as a full time Tool UX Designer in the AAA games industry on the 'Glacier 2' editor on which the Hitman series is built, where he was present for the end of Hitman 1 and the beginning of Hitman 2, and the 'Decima' editor on which the Horizon series was built, where he was present for the end of The Frozen Wilds, and the beginning of The Forbidden West. He has also consulted on Unity asset store level editors, and spent a few years working at Apple on AR creation tools such as Reality Composer and Reality Converter, which has made him well acquainted with the workflows of Pixar's USD framework. Next to that, he created and organizes the Tool Design Roundtables, talks at conferences around the world, and has contributed a chapter about Tool Design in the book 'An Architectural Approach to Level Design, Second Edition.