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.

Phil Conrod

Phil Conrod has been working in both Game Development and Information Technology for over forty years. Phil bought his first computer in 1980 and started publishing games for his family & friends to play. The Conrod Family founded BibleBytes in 1982 to commercially publish some of the first Christian computer games for the microcomputer market. Phil has been a regular speaker & workshop leader at the Christian Game Developer’s Conference for many years. In 2016, Phil was presented the CGDC Barnabas Award for his family’s many contributions to the Christian Games industry and to the CGDC organization. Over the past 35 years, Phil served in many different senior IT leadership roles at companies like Sundstrand Aerospace, SAFECO Insurance, FAMILYLIFE, Kenworth Truck Company, PACCAR and Darigold (Got Milk?). Phil last served as the Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer at Darigold for over a decade before retiring in 2019. Phil has published over two dozen STEM, Gaming & Computer Science related textbooks which are used in K-12 schools & Universities around the world to help teach App & Game Development. You can find his various App & Game Development textbooks on Amazon.com, B&N and Walmart. Today, Phil serves as the President & Publisher of Kidware Software and BibleByte Books & Games. You can read more about his games, applications and textbook tutorials at BibleByte Books and Kidware Software.

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, and Michael Herrera.

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 my college did not bode well, so he chose my 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

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

My favorite quote is “Think. Tinker. Dominate”, because I 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. My favorite pastime is to daydream entire worlds, stories, and characters (but not while driving!) based on my 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. I enjoy working out and eating delicious food to counteract my progress.

I grew up in foster care and have lived my entire life using video games as a means of escape – games like Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts, yep, I’ve got deep roots for Square Enix – but now, I want to develop games in the same creative vein to help people escape this world and embrace something greater – God. I have an amazing and hilarious five year old son named Aiden, and now that I’m a father, I truly understand God’s love for me for the first time in my life, so it drives my creative process!