Date: Friday 1st September
Time:1:55pm
Since its release in March 2023, DREDGE has taken the indie gaming world by storm; selling over 1m copies, winning international game awards and gaining high praise from both critics and players alike.
Join the Black Salt Games team for a discussion that will cover how they came up with the concept of DREDGE, what went into building the world and creating the much-praised atmosphere of the game, what was left on the cutting room floor and why they think it’s captured so much attention and praise.
About the speakers
Mikey is a swiss army knife when it comes to 3D Art. He flipped a coin to get into 3D and Game Development well over a decade ago and has stuck with that call ever since.
With a wealth of experience under his belt, Mikey has served as the Art Department Lead at one of New Zealand’s largest game development studios, and has contributed to projects for some of the world’s biggest companies on characters from the Transformers franchise to Disney Princesses. Being an avid gamer all his life, he now works at Black Salt Games creators of the Cosmic Horror Fishing Adventure game DREDGE!
David is a freelance music composer and sound designer based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is the audio lead and composer for DREDGE by Black Salt Games, the composer for Denari by Astronaut Diaries, and is a sound designer for the Texas-based indie studio Strange Scaffold.
David is also a classical composer and specialises in orchestral and chamber composition. He has held multiple composer residencies with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and he has worked with top New Zealand ensembles and musicians, including Stroma, NZtrio, Jade String Quartet, and world champion accordionist Grayson Masefield. He completed a Master’s Degree in Music Composition at the University of Auckland in 2021.
Alex’s passion for video games ignited a career path towards creating them himself. With over a decade of experience in the industry, he started as a 2D artist at one of the largest game studios in the country working on countless projects for companies like Disney, and now leads the Art Direction at Black Salt Games on their debut title DREDGE.
Skilled in both 2D and 3D, he now finds himself loving the more technical side of artistic development and spends a lot of his time creating shaders and effects that push the visual style to the limits.
Nadia is a seasoned game producer and studio head with over a decade of experience in the industry. In 2021, Nadia ventured into independent game development with a small team of talented game developers and a plan. Two years later and with the successful launch of their debut title, DREDGE, under her belt, Nadia continues to drive the Black Salt Games team towards new milestones in game development.
