ABOUT
BRACE
YOURSELF
GAMES

Aaron Gordon

Game Design Director

Aaron knows a thing or two about design and leadership. He’s worked on a variety of titles from limb-flailing motion games, epic space sims and established AAA fan favorites. With a passion for design frameworks, methodologies and collaborative design, Aaron is a force multiplier for our teams! When he’s not grinding on Destiny, binging One Piece or running D&D you’ll probably find him hurtling down a mountain somewhere or trapped under his cats.

Lilly Lee

(SHE/HER)

Financial Controller

While working as a bookkeeper to pay for her accounting degree, Lilly spent mornings on the WoW auction house buying and trading items to amass a horde of gold. Now, with over 15 years of work experience in finance, she uses her skills as the financial controller of Brace Yourself Games.

Kyle Engelmann

Programmer

Kyle joined the games industry in 2019 and has experience as a programmer and a technical designer on small and large projects alike. His favorite games are ones with a strong focus on discovery, such as Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds, and Baba is You. In his free time, he enjoys forcing his affection onto his cat, ordering chicken nuggets off the kids’ menu, and trying to learn entirely too many musical instruments at once.

Kimberly Voll

CEO

Specialising in AI, game design, and human behaviour, Kim has been making, playing, and thinking about games for as long as she can remember. She’s had the honour of working on some great games big and small, including League of Legends, Fantastic Contraption, and VALORANT, and is extremely passionate about how we can make games and gaming spaces more inclusive by design.

Hanna Hildebrandt

Creative Director and Technical Artist

Hanna is a technical artist, writer, and award-winning animation director who has worked on more than 40 different video games, movies, and TV shows. She has a background in interactive fiction, UI design, film production, programming, VFX, theatre, and journalism, which is both strangely confluent and difficult to fit in a bio.

Danny Baranowsky

Composer, Designer

Danny Baranowsky is a composer, musician and larger-than-life personality living in Vancouver, Canada by way of Mesa, Arizona. Over the past decade, Danny has risen to the top of his field, composing the music for best-selling games Canabalt, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, Desktop Dungeons, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and more. Danny’s music immediately demands attention with soaring melodies and complex harmonies and has garnered him critical acclaim from publications such as Kotaku, PCGamer and Destructoid.

Ryan Clark

Founder

A veteran independent game developer, Ryan has been creating award winning games since 2004, including Crypt of the NecroDancer, IncrediBots, Professor Fizzwizzle, and many more.

• Ryan's Full Biography
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Pavel Efimov

3D Artist, Technical Artist

Pavel is a 3D artist / generalist who enjoys making game art the most when it’s a combination of popping 3D graphics and some tech behind it that makes it alive. Loves establishing content pipelines, enjoys vivid-colored art (does it look weird? even better) and is passionate about car culture.

Ariel Zhou

Director of Finance

Ariel is a CPA and an Accounting Honour graduate from SFU. She first joined the game industry in 2014 and is passionate about improving financial infrastructure to drive business growth. Her expertise includes financing, audit management, internal controls, risk management, financial infrastructure design, and process improvements. Outside of work, she loves exploring the next hot dining spot in town

Alain Carter

(HE/HIM)

Senior Programmer

With experience in AAA, mobile, and social games, Alain worked for years on game side projects and game jams before making the transition to professional independent development.

Dakota Bosman-Kennedy

Game Designer

Dakota’s love-affair with game design and programming began at an early age with the versatility of the Starcraft Campaign Editor. After exploring a variety of career paths he found his passion in the game industry’s creative and collaborative work environment. In his free time, Dakota enjoys learning about the world, breaking strategy games, and bouldering.

Alexa Schiess

(SHE/HER)

QA Manager

Passionate about documented and efficient problem solving, Alexa worked as a printing press operator before finally making the jump to games. In her time at Brace Yourself Games she’s also picked up a passion for accessibility in games and pushing quality processes up the pipeline, making QA a more integral part of the game design flow. In her spare time, she enjoys playing a wide variety of games, watching horror movies, and scuba diving.

Jaymee Mak

Lead Producer, Publishing and Partner Development

Jaymee is an award-winning filmmaker and actor, who also happens to be a hyper organized game producer who’s passionate about psychological safety. Over the last decade, Jaymee has dipped her marathon-running toes into game design, UX design, community management, marketing and directing. Jaymee loves ending meetings earl-

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David Nguyen

Junior Game Designer

David is a programmer graduate turned designer that’s worked on stuff including the Playdate console, TTRPGs, and now other cool indie projects! An avid rhythm gamer who enjoys dabbing to his coworkers’ chagrin.

Andrew Stewart

Principal Animator

Andrew is a born and raised Vancouverite who has been fortunate enough to animate on such projects as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Luigi’s Mansion 3, and the Gears of War franchise. Throughout his life, he has maintained a passion for video games, art, and anything that allows him to express himself creatively. He is laser-focused on growing his craft and sharing his knowledge with others. He also enjoys any sort of athletic or food-related activity.

Stephen Kiazyk

Programmer

Stephen joined the game industry after toying with hobbyist game development for many years prior. With industry experience ranging from visual effects, web front and back-end, virtual reality, and computational geometry, he lives an eternal commitment to becoming a Jack-of-too-many trades.

Marlon Wiebe

Lead Designer

Marlon is a unique game designer who wields his skills as a videographer, editor, and motion graphics animator to create mockups of his designs. He lead the prototyping and early demo phases for Rift of the NecroDancer.

Marlon came to design through years of crafting indie video game trailers and cinematics. Along with Crypt of the NecroDancer and Industries of Titan, he’s worked on other prominent games such as Darkest Dungeon, FTL, Into the Breach, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and many more.

Madeleine Gray

Director of Communications

Madeleine (also responds to Maddie) began her career developing communities on the esports side of the industry, building up fans of the Vancouver Titans and Seattle Surge in the Overwatch League and Call of Duty League. She believes games are more fun when you have people to share them with.

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Artyom Zuev

Senior Programmer

I’m a generalist game developer with over 10 years of experience in programming, technical art, UI and tool dev. I love working on hard multidisciplinary problems common in game development: it’s equally exciting to create intuitive interfaces, dazzling shader effects, tools for game designers or procedural systems.

Logan Woo

Junior System Administrator

Logan is the IT guy of the company and a future ethical hacker. When he isn’t working, he is hanging out with cousins/friends, working on his many hobbies, or he is drowning in his backlog of shows to watch and games to play.