Sep 18–21, 2024

2018 Game Devs of Color Expo

545 attendees met at the Schomburg Center in Harlem to play unique games.

Relive the memories

Get a quick look at the all day event at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, NYC.

See the Twitter moment

2018 games list

After HOURS

Bahiyya Khan

after HOURS is a vignette, FMV game, that allows players a glimpse into the life of Lilith Gray – a young woman who was molested as a child and suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder as a result. By spending a night alone with Lilith in her bedroom and subsequently, her head, players learn Lilith’s story by adopting a double gaze: that of the player witnessing Lilith’s story and piecing together why she behaves and responds as she does and to an extent, the gaze of Lilith herself. This is achieved by having access to the voices in her head and the thoughts that respond to those voices. Hand drawn animations over the film serve to provide a more visceral experience of the game.

Becker Derby

Maximum Crash

Becker Derby is an intergalatic one touch homerun derby to go featuring Becker College's one and only Hank the Hawk. Players are tasked with enduring gravity bent pitches, crowds of SEEGull agents, and fighting against a dark dimensional force only known as the Void.

Belle Tower

Red Limes Games

Once upon a time... There lived a dragon. It was very strong but very lonely. To rid itself of loneliness, the dragon kidnapped a single Prince from a neighboring kingdom and held him in a tower. This prince gave the Dragon great happiness and in time became its most guarded treasure. Although the Prince was miserable and although the dragon did not like this misery, it couldn't help itself from wanting more treasures. So it took another prince. And another. The land can no longer turn a blind eye, and three princesses from bystander kingdoms have left on a quest to retrieve the lost Princes. Now the dragon must find a way to protect its hoard...

Boyfriend Dungeon

Kitfox Games

Romance your swords! Capture the hearts of weapons to level them up in this “shack-and-slash” dungeon crawling adventure.

Catacomb Kids

FourbitFriday

A very roguelike platformer based on emergent interactions and quick thinking.

Cede

BareHand

Cede is an Action RPG modernized by a unique mechanic called "Combat Farming". Enter Wastelands, burst monsters into seeds becoming vegetation, nurture sprouts into combative vegetation, and farm these defender or supporter plants to lead your team into victory against swarms of enemies.

Code Romantic

Pretty Smart Games

Code Romantic is a computer science puzzle game wrapped in a sci-fi love story. Join the Human Defense Department's last ditch effort to save the world by: teaching the brightest students in the nation how to hack and scramble the brains of the enemy. Follow the journey of Mina Lovelace as she seeks to prove herself worthy of following in her mother's footsteps, and tries not to embarrass herself in front of her childhood crush in the process! No prior programming experience is necessary; we use real code to teach you roughly the equivalent of an entry level computer science course.

Discord Duels

Jamal Woods

Discord Duels is a text based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game that you can play straight from the comfort of your own discord server.

Doodle Studio 95

Fernando Ramallo

DOODLE STUDIO 95 is a FUN drawing and animation tool for Unity. Doodle an animation without leaving the Editor and turn your drawings into sprites, UI elements, particles or textures, with a single click.

EXPOSURE, a game of camouflage

The Sheep's Meow

You are a tiny creature in a dangerous world. Lead your defenseless children to safety. Adapt to new predators each level … until you evolve into a different species. Survive in an evolving environment by morphing between light & dark forms to camouflage from your predators. But be careful: you won’t be able to see yourself either. Lose the ability to see where you are, and learn to feel & know where you’re going.

Final Spike

Sean Heron

Final Spike is a two-player local multiplayer game based on a classic staple of the Summer Olympic Games--beach volleyball. Players compete against each other to see who can score the most points, using sets, slides, spikes, fastfalls, and the powerful Final Spike technique to take whatever advantage they can get to win!

Here's How It Happened

Team Murder Squad

Here's How It Happened is a social, storytelling card game in which a group of friends have been accused of murder! Tell the most convincing cover up story to prove yourself innocent by any means necessary, even if it means throwing your friends under the bus! But you would never ACTUALLY throw someone under a bus, because you're not a murderer..... right?

Museum Multiverse VR

Made in Brooklyn Games

Museum Multiverse is a virtual reality puzzle platformer. This 3rd person experience chronicles the adventures of a child that has mysteriously awoken in an abandoned museum. He must traverse the various worlds that exist within the art pieces within the depths of the cursed museum in order to find a way to escape. The museum has been abandoned and sealed off, a microcosm of society's diminished view of minority artists, and history's selective amnesia toward contributions of people of color.

Neon Krieger Yamato

LIONPLEX

Relive the arcade era! Select from 8 unique characters and brawl your way to victory in Neon Krieger Yamato - solo or with a friend!  A genre mashup of Japanese 90s gaming, its goal is to capture a mix of stylish combos, sidescrolling action, and twitch combat puzzles, presented in a pixel art cyberpunk world harkening to the days of 16 bit.

NYU Game Center, A Memoir Blue

Shelley Chen and Kevin Zeng

A Memoir Blue is a single player magical realist narrative told through the transformative movement of water. Players solve dreamlike click-and-drag interactions that bend reality as they help Miriam relive a mysterious journey she took with her mother and uncover emotions long buried beneath the shifting waves of time.

NYU Game Center, Anyball

Anyone

Inspired by games kids make up on the fly, Anyball is a multiplayer game about procedurally generated sports. Each round is made of random rules that are created and combined together. Every rule draws from a huge pool of sports and toy objects which are used in the competition. Players know that they have to score points but not necessarily how to, so the main activity is exploring the rules and figuring out the objectives.

NYU Game Center, Omino

 Ben Costrell, Chris Williams, Edanur Kuntman, Jack Schlesinger

Omino is a digital board game that delivers a condensed and potent strategy game experience in 4 minutes. In Omino players place tetrominoes to pave their way across the map using them to claim territory, defend, boost their economies, or all three at once!

NYU Game Center, Stress Express

Pornsima Duangratana

Stress Express is a humorous party game that mimics a busy, overworked, and overwhelmed modern lifestyle. It’s a 2 to 8 players game where players compete with each other to complete the most tasks while laughing upon the absurdity of a chaotic life.

Objectif

A.M. Darke

Objectif is a social game that facilitates dialogue about the relationship between race, gender, and standards of beauty. Each round, players compete to place the most attractive card according to a judge. The judge must explain their reason for choosing one person over the others, giving players an opportunity to influence, argue, and persuade their way to victory. Objectif is a response to the Psychology Today article “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Races?"

Robot Island Prologue

New Beings

Robot Island Prologue is a narrative-driven game where you play as a robotic flight attendant on an interstellar transport, meeting your newly assigned pilot for the very first time. Together, you go on a lonely mission to a distant planet.

Saturday Morning Games - The Card Game

Saturday Morning Games

Saturday Morning Games is a battle card game based off of popular Saturday Morning Cartoons! Fight over random weapons, with popular characters from multiple shows and conquer your opponent by winning all of their bowls of cereal!

Skate & Date

Gensuta

Skate and Date is a roller derby rhythm ga(y)me where your rhythm game stats can affect the story.

So obscure;

STARDUST★SODA

Share your hopes, insecurities, and favourite albums as you navigate an online friendship between two teenagers living in 2005 Hong Kong. so obscure; is a visual novel about high school, cultural identity, and honesty, played through a series of chat conversations.

Solace State

Vivid Foundry

Solace State is a 3D visual novel set in near-future surveillance state, where hacking identities can mean the difference between unifying resistance or enacting reluctant acceptance of an unjust fate. As Chloe, an activist whose hacking affects psychological perception, the player reads story text that is embedded into the 3D environment, negotiate and engage with characters, and make choices that impact the game’s final outcome. From nebulous secrets to coming-of-age friendships and romances, there are no easy answers on the path to build hope and righting past wounds.

SwimSanity!

Decoy Games

SwimSanity! is a 4-player, underwater party shooter that allows you to control a Mooba, an aquatic hero. Moobas can use a variety of different power ups and weapons but most importantly when fully powered up they can “Unleash SwimSanity” - a powerful super move with devastating effects.

The Last Stop

ota & z04

 The Last Stop is a Chinese-Filipino inspired Point & Click 2D Adventure Game  about a college student, Christopher “Kit” Chen. After a quick nap on the train, Kit finds himself stranded on Orez Island with no money to get back home. Luckily, the island is populated with some unique residents…

The Ultimate Clap Back

Mot & Dot LLC

The Ultimate Clap Back is a fast-paced game of wordplay.  With just the right amount of sarcasm, snark, and shade, this game is bound to shock and keep you laughing for hours!

Xob

MrTedders

Xob is a puzzle game about being a box. It rocks and sometimes it talks. Occasionally to an ox but mostly to a fox.

Zarvot

snowhydra games

A charming arcade shooter about cubes going banana picking.

Show all 29 games

2018 speaker list

Yussef Cole

Yussef Cole is a writer and motion designer hailing from the Bronx, NY. Much of his time is spent animating for the screen but he spends the rest of it thinking and writing about games.

Shana Bryant

Producer and 15-year veteran in the industry, Shana T Bryant has had a hand in crafting some of your favorite videogames (and might’ve even canceled a few).

Shana speaks on everything from building teams and optimized game production to designing interactions for emerging tech and career management for underrepresented professionals.

Shana is a published author, avid comic artist, and inclusive design geek, expounding ideas with a spoonful of charm and a touch of snark. For a deeper look, join her at theMushroomQueendom.com // terribleallies.com

Tanya Kan

Tanya Kan is the founder and creative of Vivid Foundry Corp. This indie studio is developing the 3D visual novel Solace State, about youth defending their rights to a better future in a deeply unequal, tyrannical society. Her company creates original, artistic interactive stories that humanize social concerns and empower civic experiences. With over five years in interactive digital media work spanning Canada and Hong Kong, Tanya Kan wears multiple hats in design, 3D and 2D art, narrative writing, and indie game business administration.

Shawn Pierre

Shawn Pierre doesn’t do much. Currently, he lives in Philly, and helps run the local meetup, currently known as Philly Dev Night. He also tries to make games.

Pattie Umali

Pattie Umali is an international education practitioner and game designer devoted to teaching youth about contemporary cultures and peoples. Pattie is the founder of InterIntellectus NFP, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that aims to prepare individuals for global citizenship and the international workplace through technology, gaming, and media. She holds an MA in Intercultural and International Communication from American University and a BA in Sociology and International Relations from Brown University. Pattie recognizes tech and gaming as an effective way to spark early interest in global education and world cultures in the K-12 age group. Her international experiences have taught her the importance of interaction with people from other cultures. Pattie is leading a development team in building InterIntellectus' first video game, a fantasy adventure role-playing game set in World War II Philippines entitled The Girl Who Sees (www.girlwhosees.com). The game's social media presence focuses on the positive representation of Filipinos and the Philippines in media and pop culture, as well as encouraging the young Filipino diaspora to rediscover their indigenous Filipino roots.

MaryMartha E. Ford-Dieng

Losing her father at an early age and shouldered with the responsibility of caring for a disabled parent, MaryMartha is no stranger to difficult times.  She turned her pain into play by developing the card game, The Ultimate Clap Back. She’s a supporter of mental health awareness, and speaks candidly about her diagnosis of anxiety and depression. She is a two-time award winning game developer, has survived brain surgery, and encourages others to be brave, fearless, and active participants in their quest for greatness.

Yvonne Thevenot

Yvonne began her career as a Systems Programmer and volunteer who taught programming logic to physically challenged students.  She later immersed herself full time into the STEM education of underrepresented students, and, with the nonprofit Yvonne founded in 2015, STEM Kids NYC, seeks to utilize emancipatory pedagogy and culturally relevant instruction to teach kids how to code, engineer, and love Science.  Yvonne is a Zankel Fellow at Columbia Teachers College, where she is developing Culturally Relevant STEM Curriculum and is a hockey mom.

Tara Walker

Tara is a Technical Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, dedicating her time to help developers build apps, games, and technical solutions in the AWS cloud. Tara has most recently been working on evangelizing AWS cloud computing architectures and development for various technologies like Mobile, Gaming, IoT, AI, Serverless just to name a few.
      
Tara’s background is as a software engineer & developer who has worked on wide-ranging development platforms and systems while leveraging a myriad of development languages across her various technical and engineering roles. Over her 20-year career, she has been employed by various Fortune 500 companies.

Sheila Moore

Sheila “DaPurpleSharpie” Moore is a spirited selfstarter in the fighting game community. She’s built her name around high-quality streams, tournament circuits, and a single-minded determination to improve her scene.

Tyriq Plummer

Tyriq Plummer is a Bay Area game dev currently making the roguelike platformer “Catacomb Kids”, which was successfully Kickstarted, Greenlit, and is currently wading to completion on Steam Early Access.

Mona Aiyed

Hello! I’m Mona, a Policy Specialist at YouTube! I help grow and protect communities on our platform!

TJ Hughes

An independent game developer and 3D artist out of St. Louis, Missouri, Tj Hughes taught himself game development in his early teens, and has since started his own company entitled “Terrifying Jellyfish”. Under this name, he intends on escaping the mundane and mediocre forever through the exorbitant use of color, playfulness, and aesthetics.

Jordan Minor

After spending four years surrounded by serious-minded journalism students, Jordan Minor enjoys using his degree to mostly write about video games, tech, entertainment, and being a big fan of the dumb internet. He’s the Senior Editor for Geek.com, so it must be working.

A.M. Darke

A.M. Darke is a conceptual artist, game designer, and activist designing games for social impact. She created the award-winning card game Objectif, which explores the intersection of race, gender, and standards of beauty.

Tim Flusk

Tim Flusk is a subaltern fighter. The term subaltern refers to the populations which - along many axes - are excluded from the hegemonic power of the environment. Tim is attempting to study and produce games that fight for the representation and upliftment of all the marginalised

Keerthik Omanakuttan

Keerthik fell in love with video games playing Space Invaders on his dad’s lap at age 4. He grew up in Muscat, Oman, a podunk Middle Eastern town devoid of anything resembling a game industry. Since leaving for college at 18, he’s come to see how different places rich with gaming culture view it differently by way of Boston, San Francisco, London, Seoul and Japan. He runs a game-inspired fitness company while building a puzzle-based anti-grav racer and a board game on the side.

Dee Del Rosario

Dee Del Rosario (they/them or she/her) is an events and community organizer in games with organizations such as Seattle Indies and Different Games Collective, along with being a gamedev hobbyist. They currently work as a web developer and educator, currently teaching programming with a non-profit school for women and gender-diverse adults.

Shawn Allen Alexander

Shawn makes (often political) art in the way of games (both digital and non), photography, poetry, and dystopian fiction. He also writes media criticism, with a focus on race/class and representation, as well as game design critique.

Sandra Honigman

Sandra is a Peruvian-American game developer currently working at Dots. There she is a game designer on Two Dots. She graduated from New York University with a BFA in Game Design and Dramatic Writing in 2016. She’s a sometimes cosplayer and a Sanrio enthusiast.

Emperatriz Ung

Emperatriz is a Chinese-Colombian writer and game designer from Southern California’s Inland Empire. In 2015 she was a fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Justice where she won a 2016 University & College Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She is pursuing her MFA in game design at NYU.

Elaine Gomez

Elaine Gomez is a Puerto Rican - Dominican game designer at E-Line Media, independent Unity developer and games educator. Elaine earned an MFA in Interactive Media and Games from University of Southern California in 2016. Her interests include the use of games and interactive media to preserve indigenous cultures, experimental game design, and methods for youth education in game development and computer programming. Elaine teaches game design at Rutgers University and at E-Line Media’s youth game studio initiative, Make Room.

Anthony Torres

Anthony Torres is a freelance game designer, Independent Unreal Engine developer, and Visual Concept Artist. Anthony earned a Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Game Art and Design from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 2016. His skills include the use of combining realistic and fantasy elements together in games, using unique programs to create vast environments, character building, as well as using different cultures, beliefs and ideas to create story settings for games.

Bahiyya Khan

 Watsup I’m Bahiyya and I’m a Muslim game developer from Johannesburg, South Africa. I’m currently doing my Masters in Experimental Narrative. I love pop-punk and indie music and reading stuff that blows my mind in a good way. I write poems and I make video games that I think are important and ought to exist outside of just my head. I do this so that people like me feel better understood and because I want to tell marginalised people’s stories. I love bread and trees.

Sharang Biswas

Sharang is an award-winning, internationally-published game designer, writer, and artist. He has exhibited games at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PioneerWorks in Brooklyn, and The Denny Gallery in Manhattan. His RPG Feast, won the IndieCade Dark Horse Award, and his boardgame Mad Science Foundation, was published in 2016 by Crypotzoic Entertainment. He regularly speaks at universities, conferences and museums, and writes for various magazines. Sharang holds a Masters from ITP at NYU-Tisch, and a Bachelors of Engineering from Dartmouth. He is the experience designer at The Medici Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

Juan Alejandro Rodriguez Morais

Juan moved to New Zealand to pursue his dream: Becoming a game developer. Throughout his journey, he has been able to work on numerous projects, acquire valuable life experiences and surround himself with great peers, all of whom have taught him great things. With support from friends and acquaintances, he co-founded the Panama Game Jam, a collective that hosts events with the game development community of Panama: Game Jams, workshops, meetups, talks. He is also the site organiser for the Global Game Jam in Panama.

Show all 25 speakers

Follow our 2018 alumni

Get regular updates from former speakers and expo participants by following our 2018 alumni list on Twitter!

See the list
Stay up-to-date

More information is coming soon! Subscribe to hear when we add new games, speakers, and more! We send emails less than once per week.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.