Board of Directors

Bernard Francois

Kenneth Thompson

Matt Fantastic

Near the end of 2009, in Belgium, Bernard decided to combine his passion for game design and game programming by starting the first company dedicated to the development of prototypes using game technology: PreviewLabs.

PreviewLabs turns ideas into interactive prototypes, allowing its clients to evaluate concepts early on. This service enables them to explore more different concepts and ultimately helps them to be more successful developing new products.

In the first twelve years of PreviewLabs, Bernard oversaw the development of prototypes for over 200 different concepts, for clients including Walt Disney Imagineering and Yale University, but also a large amount of startups seeking to develop new products. In 2016, Bernard established PreviewLabs’ US office, which is now based in Guilford, Connecticut.

Bernard is also the chairman of FLEGA, the Flemish Games Association, and founder of GameDevCT, an organization aiming to connect and grow the games industry and games industry ecosystem in Connecticut.

I’m the Game Dev Professor. I research, consult, and educate. As an academic, I came to the University of Connecticut to engage in research and start the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Game Design program from scratch. From a research perspective, I have been a Primary Investigator on grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Institute of Health, The National Science Foundation, and several awards internal to UConn. My current focus is on delivering humanities content to public audiences by designing and directing Courtroom 600, which brings to life 1st hand documents, witness testimony, and other archival documents through the lens of the Nuremberg Trials and related events with partnerships with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Nuremberg Memorial. My work holds a mirror up to countries on the road to fascism and unpacks the lead-up to the events of WWII and how a group of Nazi war criminals manipulated the public into committing crimes against humanity. When I’m not developing new syllabi, teaching, or researching, you can find me supporting UConn programs, including MFA Student advisor, the Big East Esports administrator, Precollege video game summer camp, and the DMD Early College Experience program administrator to high schools across the state of CT. As a game developer, I have directed game projects from start to finish, focusing on Game Design, Level Design, and Production. I’ve worked with publishers such as SEGA, Electronic Arts, and Activision on blockbuster franchises such as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Madagascar, and Shrek. My work in the video game industry has received Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Award for best video game, Indie Game of the Year, and Innovation Awards from multiple sources.
http://gamedevprofessor.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedevprof/
https://www.facebook.com/gamedevprof
https://www.instagram.com/gamedevprof/
https://www.twitch.tv/gamedevprofessor

Matt primarily does freelance game design, development, and art direction for publishers around the world as the Creative Director of Forever Stoked, the studio they founded over a decade ago. They also own a game shop/library (Elm City Games), are sometimes an adjunct professor of game design, publish indie games, books, zines, vinyl records, and other creative weirdness with killjoy, founded the New Haven Game Makers Guild, are on the board of the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), the Tabletop Mentorship Program, and GameDev CT, organize Fantasticon and the Connecticut Festival of Indie Games, and do consulting/fixing across the game industry as well as for corporate, NGO, and institutional clients like Netflix and Yale.

Jake Bayer

Kelly Mark

Gregory Garvey

Jake has been in the gaming industry since 2011. His journey started with downloading 3D Gamestudio before switching to Unity a few months later. Along the way, he has worked on multiple projects. He has also showcased his work at numerous game festivals, including the Boston Festival of Indie Games and its Connecticut variant, CT FIG.

After graduating from Manchester Community College with an Associate of Science in Computer Game Design in 2019, Jake briefly joined the startup ActiveScaler Inc. Prior to joining Max Gaming Studios (maxgamingstudios.com) as a Senior Unity Developer, Jake primarily ran an independent game development business called Closed Umbrella Games (closedumbrellagames.com).

Jake is among the founding board members of GameDevCT, and has since helped organize numerous events throughout Connecticut.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakebayer/

Kelly is relatively new to the game development scene; what began as a simple Covid hobby rapidly turned into a fierce passion, something she would spend all her free time doing for months on end. This passion brought her early success in her career, and she is currently finishing up a project with Motive Labs, a company which focuses on technology that can help people in various ways. For this project, she is creating a mobile app of games that are designed to test and track vision and help prevent vision loss for its players. Kelly loves the idea of merging games with education, health, and wellness, and hopes to create more games that help people in the future. She also freelances and offers game development services through her studio, tinyzigzag, and through Upwork. She knows several programming languages, and is a graduate of Flatiron School, which is one of the most highly rated coding bootcamps for software development.

As a board member of GameDevCT, she hopes to expand the local community and bring more people from all over Connecticut into the group, and to try to find new ways of keeping the community connected.

Garvey holds the appointment of Professor of Game Design & Development at Quinnipiac University where he founded the Game Design & Development Program in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts in 2010. He is currently a Fellow of the People’s United Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PUCIE) at Quinnipiac. He has also served as Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Associate Professor of Interactive Digital Design (now GID), and as Visiting Fellow in the Arts at Quinnipiac (1999-2001).

Other appointments include Associate Artist of the Digital Media Center for the Arts at Yale University (now the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media). Prior to joining Quinnipiac University, he was Chair of the Department of Design Art at Concordia University in Montrèal and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Montrèal Design Institute. From 1983-85 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Prior to his academic appointments he worked in the games industry starting in companies such as Parker Brothers (Beverly, MA) and Spinnaker Software (Cambridge, MA).