Meet Your Board Members

Amy Green

Amy Green is a writer and game designer for Numinous Games. As a part of the Numinous team, she has shipped 5 titles. 3 VR, 1 mobile and 1 PC/mobile. Numinous Games is most well known for their game “That Dragon, Cancer” which was recognized as the Most Innovative Game of the Year by the British Academy Awards, it also received the Peabody/Facebook Futures of Media Award. The SXSW Matthew Crump award for Cultural Innovation, and The Game Awards Game for Impact Award, as well as a handful of others.

She is the mother of five children, including Joel, whose life and death inspired the creation of That Dragon, Cancer. Her family and the creation of the game were the subjects of the Emmy award-winning documentary “Thank You For Playing.” She also gave a TED talk about her experiences helping to create a game about her son, which led to many speaking opportunities in the years that have followed.

She has served on the leadership team at her church for a decade, lead the youth group and the women’s ministry, She taught Sunday School for many years and has been known to give the occasional Sunday morning sermon.

Amy had a slow transition into game development. She spent many years supporting her husband in his game development, offering ideas, feedback, and bits of writing, before she began to see herself as a game developer as well. She loved engaging with other spouses of game developers as well as their kids and other supporters and helping them recognize their important roles in the game development process. She is a big fan of cheering these support people onto their own contributions in game development. Game development requires a wide range of skills and not all of them are technical!

She is currently working part-time for Numinous Games and is spending the rest of her time writing books and working on her speaking/writing projects.

Tim Emmerich

The CGDC was founded with God’s direction in 2002 by Tim Emmerich. Tim works as an electrical/computer engineer for his day job. And started his own company, Graceworks Interactive, in 1998, dedicated to glorifying our Lord through Software and the Internet. GraceWorks Interactive develops, publishes, and distributes Christian Games. Inspired Idea’s products were first distributed in 2003. GraceWorks’ first game, The Interactive Parables, shipped in 2004. Since then, the Interactive Bible series now has 10 titles with one more in development. In addition to self-publishing, GraceWorks also publishes for Inspired Idea, Virtue Games, and White Knight Games.

Tim puts everyone at ease (be forewarned, he likes to give hugs) and ensures that the organization stays true to its core values and mission. Since Tim is an engineer and not an event planner, this is further proof that CGDC’s endurance and growth is a “God thing.”

Tim would like to add that there have been so many volunteers that sacrificed their time and energy which has been most humbling to him. Considerable contributions from former Board members like Charlie Mauck and his family were important, especially at improving the conference logistics and creation of the CGDC Expo area. Our social media presence was resurrected (nay, created) by former board member Michael Herrera which was key at growing attendance and the online community. Tim feels that having a large active board of directors has been a true blessing to him and the CGDC organization.

Tim would also like to recognize significant volunteer work from earlier years (and for some through today), significant contributions and also prayer warriors were: Keith Cornell, Cloutier Family, Laurene Wells Family, Charlie Mauck Family, John de Margheriti, Tom Bean, Peter Fokos, Bill Bean, Dan Prow with ICON Communications, Chris Skaggs and Soma Games, Brenda Huff, Peter Engelbrite, Seth Crofton, Michael Herrera and Phil Conrod with BibleByte Books & Games.

Matthew Colón

Matt Colón started attending the CGDC back in 2014. He serves as the CGDC small groups coordinator working with leaders to launch small groups. Outside of CGDC, Matt has been in the software industry for 14 years and he is an engineering manager at Adobe, leading a team developing part of the UI for the Adobe Experience Platform. Matt also served as an elder at his church, and led their men’s ministry for seven years. He is very thankful to be married to his wife of 14 years and be a daddy to two daughters and a son.

Matt wanted to make games since he was a kid, and even felt like this was the direction God had for his life. However, after tailoring his college career around game development-related courses, the door to game development closed after being made aware of the unhealthy crunch culture and its effects on families; hearing “I’ve seen a lot of divorces” from industry developers who visited his college did not bode well, so he chose his wife-to-be over a game development career out of college and got a “normal” job. It wasn’t until Minecraft showed him the viability of single or small teams creating games and releasing via digital distribution that he realized that God was leading him into indie game development, but he still held off on truly starting on game development, saying he would do it “someday.”

At CGDC 2017, after the small groups panel announced leaders for the next year, he decided to commit to creating a game and was able to release Dark OmniChess at CGDC 2018. Since then, he has been learning about many aspects of game design, marketing games, and how to create top-down pixel art adventure games. He would love to make many pixel art games of various genres that bring back the joy of the SNES era. Currently, he is leading the 2D arcade game squad for Games for Love’s upcoming VR game.

Brock Henderson

Brock believes the world is a better place when we play together. As co-founder and CTO of PxlPug, he is excited to share that message with the world. PxlPug’s purpose is to create a healthy community where individuals are valued for who they are and are encouraged to grow into who they were created to be. The studio does this by crafting games that bring people together.

Brock is a designer, developer, and entrepreneur. He has a passion for creating video games and a proven track record with over 25 shipped titles and 3+ million downloads. Before entering the games industry, he co-founded the design firm Paper Tower where he served as its creative director for over a decade. In that time, he designed interactive experiences for clients like Coca-Cola, Motorola, and Harvard.

Brock currently resides in a small town in Iowa with his beautiful wife Vanessa and their five children—where he loves to read and blog.

Michael Perrigo

Michael Perrigo is a writer, web designer, game developer and founder of Faithdrawn Studios – a game studio focused on exhibiting discipleship qualities through fantasy storytelling. He is currently working on his first title, Fayestory, which will focus on the dynamics between learning to trust God and self-sufficiency. Faith vs. Doubt. God vs. self.

Michael’s favorite quote is “Think. Tinker. Dominate”, because he must discover something new each day, reverse engineer, and conquer it. Luckily, anything worth doing is ever-changing, which creates a moving target, making the chase for creativity and excitement never-ending. His favorite pastime is to daydream entire worlds, stories, and characters (but not while driving!) based on his not-so-great upbringing and testimony in hopes that it can help others understand that they don’t have to become their past just because they came from it – that they can set the example instead. He enjoys working out and eating delicious food to counteract his progress.

He grew up in foster care and has lived his entire life using video games as a means of escape – games like Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts (yep, he’s got deep roots for Square Enix) but now, he wants to develop games in the same creative vein to help people escape this world and embrace something greater – God. Michael has an amazing and hilarious five-year-old son named Aiden, and now that he’s a father he truly understands God’s love for him for the first time in his life, so it drives his creative process!

Kris Murray

Kris has a passion for the place where God and games intersect. Coming with years of experience of teaching kids about Jesus at Bible Study Fellowship, he takes his passion into Christian Gaming and Game Development community. Having firmly believing that God’s current role for him is to level up the quality of Christian games, he brought over the tradition of the speedgame or game jam to CGDC and started the new tradition of the Community Game. He currently serves as the creative director of the Community Game and oversees the worldwide network of volunteers to design, develop, test, and launch a free Christian game every year. At the time of this writing, the team has released: Gates of Mansoul (2015), Dreams and Nightmares (2021), and Space Beastz (2022).

He also has a solo development project he’s working on with BibleByte Games entitled “Exodus Vigil”, a realistic 3D story-driven puzzle game. There he focuses on game design, programming, level design as well as writing. The game is based on Kris’ published historical fiction novel “Exodus: God of the Slave” which follows the familiar story of the Exodus from the Egyptian perspective.

Living in Northern California with his wife and son, Kris enjoys many pastimes. For games, he typically plays Role-playing and Real-time strategy games. In the outdoors he likes to go hiking and camping as well as archery and skiing. He is also a proficient violinist and violist. Professionally, Kris works in the tech industry having experience in Software Development, Embedded Firmware development, Windows Driver Development, Product Engineering, and Product Security.

Chris Skaggs

Chris is the founder of Soma Games in Beautiful Downtown Newberg, OR. As fate would have it, he entered the whole world of Christian game development at CGDC in 2005. back then he had exactly zero experience in the gaming world but committed to learning and building a studio that sought to follow God’s voice and value its people above most anything else. Soma Games released its first game, G: Into The Rain, in 2009 and has built over 300 games and apps on virtually every platform available for a wide range of customers. Most recently Soma has been focused on a series of games based on the fantastic Redwall books.

Besides wearing the boss-man hat Chris loves to write for games, speak to students, and share his faith with anybody who will listen. In venues like Boot Camp Northwest, GDC Next, NRB, and Lion’s Den Chris’ engaging style and fun storytelling has built a fun side-hustle.

Chris lives in loves the Pacific Northwest with his bride, Samantha, and two bairns Odin and Athena, while Savannah studies her heart out in far-away Michigan.