ACE - Arena: Cyber Evolution/Credits

Malik Boukhira – Co-Founder Malik is a game designer with over 10 years of experience. With both a scientific and artistic background, he combines state of the art design methodology with exceptional creativity. Malik studied industrial design at Montreal University, and later complemented his training with a diploma in video game design. At Ubisoft, he worked on the legendary Prince of Persia series and was part of the team responsible for the genesis of the highly successful Assassin’s Creed franchise. At Electronic Arts, Malik joined a team developing a new intellectual property, where he introduced novel development methodologies and conceived highly innovative gameplay. He afterwards joined one of EA’s elite teams on Dead Space, one of the industry’s most respected franchises.

Simon Darveau – Co-Founder After earning a master degree in manufacturing engineering, Simon decided to quit his initial field of expertise to join Ubisoft and the video game industry. During his 5 years at Ubisoft, he’s been Game Designer on Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and design director for the naval segment of Assassin’s Creed 3. He was also involved in Ubisoft prototyping cell and led a R&D gameplay team. In 2012, along with Malik Boukhira and Atul Mehra, he founded Spearhead, an Indie studio focussed on game design and innovation. Tiny Brains will be the first title on this young but promising studio!

Atul Mehra – Co-Founder Atul brings with him 16+ years of experience as a development director, project manager and systems architect. He has a strong blend of project management skills mixed with people management and 9 years of software engineering skills. He has worked on major titles such as Need for Speed, FIFA and Army of Two. This diverse background of project management and people management has over the years fostered the ability to anticipate issues and future challenges that potentially derail projects. Over the course of the years he has helped ship over 9 major game titles.

Adrien Quay-Theevnon – Designer or Programmer.

David Boily – Engineer David joins Spearhead Games with experience from Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and a PhD in artificial intelligence from McGill University. He brings with him a jest to solve complex problems in AI and gameplay and to research new tech that we can bring to games. He brings to the team over 8 years of R&D experience which helps iterate and implement solutions very quickly.

Franco Salas – Engineer Franco started programming games since he was 14 years old with his 486 in QBasic. He has been professionally programming games for about 11 years now. His favorite games include Mass Effect, Fallout, Dead Space and Lego Harry Potter which he plays with his daughter. Franco’s specialties are A.I. Optimizations and debugging low level crashes. And he had a hamster called Gin Gin.

Jerome Parent — Game designer / QA

Kei$ha Chauvin – Artist Kei$ha is the newest member of the Spearhead Games team. She recently started her career in the video game industry with her work at Warner Brothers Montreal. It is her enthusiasm, creativeness, attention to detail, speed, and willingness to take initiative and learn that sets her apart from a lot of other artists.

Mathieu Bissonnette – Level Designer Mathieu started game and level design a long time ago but since then derived to many different academics fields, including religious studies, peace-building and psychoanalysis. His ability to understand fundamental human behavior and the core systems of religions and languages has come to be a great asset in design specially for systemic design. Being gameplay focused he is passionate about finding new core gameplay mechanics that are always more intuitive, deep and most importantly fun!.

Maximilien Faubert – Artist

Philip Tam – Technical Level Designer Drawing from his studies in computer science and in film, Philip Tam combines technical expertise with a flair for visual storytelling. As a level designer with 6 years of experience at Visceral Montreal (formally known as EA Montreal), he has worked with the powerful Unreal 3, Neo and Frostbite 2 engines. He enjoys pushing the limits of technology and designing new and unexpected situations for the players to experience. As a movie buff, he fully understands that the importance of “show, don’t tell” is as                                   applicable in games and level design as it is in cinema.

Rene Oculi – Animator

Thierry Van Elsuwe – Lead Engineer With over 12 years of experience, Thierry has worked on and shipped all genres of games with Ubisoft. He has been part of the games industry in Montreal for a very long time. Over the years he has built his knowledge base regarding the capabilities of various platforms, their limitations and how to get the best out of them, so as to make the best possible game. His core expertise lies in AI, gameplay and core systems.

Yan Mongrain – Senior Artist With over 8 years of experience in level art, Yan heads our art production at Spearhead Games. He built his core expertise at Ubisoft working on projects such as Shawn White and Prince of Persia. Additionally he learned how to work in a start-up studio and culture at Trapdoor Inc. He brings with him not only the expertise of a level artist but also a 3D, texture and concept artist.