Industry Panel

 Steve Isaacs is the Director of Secondary Education at Epic Games. His mission in this role is to support educators and students in exploring career opportunities that leverage interactive 3d skills. Prior to his role at Epic, Steve was a public school teacher for 28 years, teaching game design and development as well as other courses related to creative uses of technology. Steve enjoys spending time with family and friends. His hobbies include video games, biking, snorkeling, hiking and live music.

Gavyn Thompson is a Senior Pipeline Technical Artist 11 at Blizzard Entertainment, where he

works at the intersection of art and engineering to help teams build scalable, production-ready workflows. With nearly two decades of experience across AAA games and feature film, Gavyn specializes in removing technical friction so creative teams can focus on making great games.

Over his career, Gavyn has contributed to large-scale productions at Blizzard, Industrial Light &

Magic, and Pixomondo, supporting artists and developers across globally distributed teams. Hiswork spans DCC tools such as Maya and 3ds Max, as well as real-time engines like Unreal,

with a focus on performance, scalability, and practical problem-solving in production

environments.

For students and aspiring developers, Gavyn brings a production-driven mindset. He

emphasizes clear communication, smart scope decisions, and building systems that support

collaboration under real-world constraints. He is passionate about mentorship and helping

emerging game developers think like production professionals, whether they are working on a

long-term title or racing the clock in an intense game jam.

Steve Stacy is has been a Principal Animator at Cryptic Studios and has even worked for Atari Games, back in the day when he used to ride his brontosaurus to work.

He has developed games such as: City of Heros, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter Online.

He loves to work in the fast-paced, collaborative, scrappy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants environment that is game development and can’t wait to see what everyone’s cooking up!

Thomas Q Brady is a design technologist at MDC, formerly at Take Two Games. He works on the Applied Artificial Intelligence team, building automated tools for designers, developers, writers, and producers.  

In previous roles, he's been a front-end engineer—building UIs and working on reusable component libraries and design language systems at places like Visa, frog design, and the retail chain H-E-B. He has also been a product designer—designing interfaces for videoconferencing software and hardware at Polycom. He led a central design team that consulted with hardware and software startups at the incubator Carnegie Technologies and authored the O'Reilly Guide to Ember.js. 

When he's not at work, you'll most likely find Thomas hanging out with his wife, teenage  son and daughter, probably watching a movie or an episode of Community/The Office—unless he's sneaked off somewhere to do some reading. Usually, it's something about physics, philosophy, anthropology, or quite possibly comic books.