GDC Europe welcomes new board members from Rovio, DeNA and more

The industry is gearing up for GDC Europe, and show organizers announced today that more industry veterans have joined the event's advisory board to help program the lectures, panels and roundtable sessions taking place at this year's conference in Cologne, Germany, alongside the Gamescom trade fair. The GDC Europe advisory board, which includes game industry notables like Mojang's Daniel Kaplan, CD Projekt Red's Bartlomiej Gawel, DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson, and Rocksteady Studios' David Hego, is very excited to welcome three new members: Rovio's Katharina Hautz, Prof. Dr. Linda Breitlauch, and Scattered Entertainment's Senta Jakobsen. Katharina Hautz serves as senior producer at Rovio Stockholm, where she oversees production and development. Hautz joined the team in Stockholm to help build a strong, effective organization capable of producing great games. She actually started her career in the film industry in 2000 before moving into the games industry in 2008 by joining Crytek, where she contributed to the development of several high profile titles like Crysis 2, Crysis 3 and Ryse. In the 13 years of her career, Kati has managed large and small projects across multiple platforms and teams. Her main professional focus is on agile software development methodologies. She is passionate about production structures, processes and pipelines and always strives to enable each member of a team to achieve their best. Prof. Dr. Linda Breitlauch is an industry veteran who teaches and researches with special focus on the areas of storytelling, serious games and dramaturgy. In 2008 she completed a PhD about dramatic composition in computer games. In addition to working as a project manager in the export and publishing sectors she has been creative producer of several film projects, has written film scripts and game concepts as well as scientific and specialist articles, among other things. In 2007 Breitlauch was appointed Europe’s first female professor for game design at the Media Design University of Applied Sciences. Since July 2013 she was Professor for Game Design and faculty leader at the Games Academy Hochschule in Berlin, from January to March 2014 as founding president. In April she started a visiting professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier. Senta Jakobsen currently serves at the Stockholm-based DeNA studio Scattered Entertainment, which focuses on creating games for smartphones and tablets. Jakobsen has been making games since 2000. She's explored game development from all sorts of angles, including being a research programmer, working as a technical project manager for an internal engine team, creating teams that build new IP and helping to run multiple studios worldwide. On her constant search for better ways to make games, coupled with her strong belief that great games are made by great people, she focuses much of her energy on developing environments in which game developers, and consequently games, can thrive. GDC Europe organizers are thrilled to welcome these professionals to the board in advance of the 2014 conference, which will be held Monday through Wednesday, August 11-13 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany. Co-located with the European gamescom trade fair, GDC Europe 2014 will continue to provide the essential pan-European perspective of game development and highlight business trends throughout the continent. To register for the conference and view the complete list of GDC Europe 2014 advisory board members, please visit the official GDC Europe website. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.