Tiago Colaço is a creative leader with over 14 years of experience shaping visual strategy, creative systems, and teams for live and mobile games.

His background spans Art Direction, Creative Direction, and Marketing Art, working closely with Product, UA, and Leadership to ensure creative decisions are intentional, scalable, and aligned with both player experience and business goals.

Beyond production, Tiago has built creative departments from the ground up, defined visual guardrails for live products, and mentored hundreds of artists across multiple disciplines and seniority levels, with a strong focus on autonomy, clarity, and long-term IP health.

He is the curator and co-organizer of Game Dev Sessions, an industry-facing platform designed to foster meaningful discussion, knowledge sharing, and community building around the present and future of game development.

The event reflects his belief that strong creative leadership is not about control, but about creating the right conditions for teams and ecosystems to grow: clear vision, clear guardrails, and trust.

Ivan Barroso nasceu em 1980, em Lisboa, Portugal. Actualmente é game designer do jogo “Alentejo: Tinto’s Law”. Certificado pela Ubisoft em Rational Game Design é também o Lead PlayStation® First Project Manager na GameNest®Lisbon. Autor de 3 livros, desenvolve igualmente investigação na área da História, cultura e influência social dos jogos, onde se inclui as publicações: “História dos Videojogos” (2012), “Service Games: The Rise and fall of SEGA” (2014) e “Revolução Interactiva: compêndio visual de computadores, jogos electrónicos, consolas domésticas e portáteis” (2018). Barroso é igualmente professor assistente no IPLeiria, Universidade Lusófona e ETIC nos cursos de Licenciatura e Mestrado em jogos, e encontra-se a finalizar a sua tese de Doutoramento dedicada aos primeiros jogos portugueses.

Ricardo Flores is the co-founder of Codfish Academy, focused on upskilling game developers and studios through advanced Unreal Engine pipelines and tools. With over 20 years of industry experience, Ricardo has grown from a developer into senior roles across production, studio management, and acceleration and incubation programs.

He served as a Senior Accelerator Manager and Resident Mentor at Nine66, part of Savvy Games Group, contributing to the development of Saudi Arabia’s gaming ecosystem. On the studio side, Ricardo led multiple AAA and AA co-development teams at Kokku, was Studio Lead at Lockwood Publishing, and played a key role in the setup and success of indie studio Fun Punch Games. Earlier in his career, he was the Lead Mobile Producer at Biodroid, managing a portfolio of action sport games including Billabong Surf Trip, MegaRamp, and XGames.

Ricardo is also a consultant and university lecturer, currently teaching at ESCS (Lisbon Polytechnic) and Lusófona University.

Passionate about his work, he likes to dig into the consumer’s mind and challenge himself to connect with that part that generates emotions. His life revolves around art, but he is also interested in data interpretation. Keeps up to date on industry trends and loves reading about screenwriting, advertising and psychology. Still works as a freelance in concept art for some projects to keep the most artistic part alive.