Meet Jeff

Jeff grew up Catholic. Did the church thing growing up, then drifted away in high school like a lot of people do. He spent the next couple decades searching — trying on different things along the way, including Islam, Rosicrucianism, even a season in Satanism. None of it filled the void. He was 42 years old when that finally changed.

August 9, 2014. He was watching God's Not Dead. He'll tell you it wasn't even the arguments in the film that got to him — it was the ending. A Newsboys concert. Music has always been a big part of Jeff's life, and something about that scene hit differently than he expected. That afternoon he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. He felt the Holy Spirit washing over him. He was instantly a new creation. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." — 2 Corinthians 5:17

He got baptized in a Seventh-day Adventist church and found a home there. He still keeps the biblical Sabbath and follows the dietary guidelines he finds in Scripture — no pork, no unclean foods. Since COVID moved everything online he mostly watches sermons on YouTube now, which he'll admit isn't quite the same. But the faith itself hasn't gone anywhere.

It's not something he puts on for the studio branding. It's just what's actually there.

Jeff has been gaming his whole life — Atari 2600, NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, and everything in between. He played Halo on a PC that had no business running it. He put nearly twenty years into World of Warcraft.

Ask his all-time favorite game and he won't even think about it: Final Fantasy VII. The 1997 original. Not the remake — the original. He'll talk about the story, about Aerith, about why nothing has ever quite touched it since. He genuinely believes it's the best game ever made. He's probably right.

His taste runs wide: RPGs, roguelites, Crash Bandicoot. He's also a Silent Hill guy, specifically because of the psychological side of it. Resident Evil is fine, he'll say, but the violence there is pretty much the point. Silent Hill always had something working underneath — dread that means something. That distinction matters to him when he thinks about the games he's making.

Jeff still runs his own residential plumbing company. That's the day job. LightSpire happens in the gaps — after hours, slow days, whenever he can get a few hours in.

What most people wouldn't guess is that he's not a complete stranger to code. He had his first email account back in 1996 and was building basic websites not long after — hand-written HTML, figuring it out as he went. That eventually grew into actual client work: Adobe Flash, e-commerce sites, more involved builds through around 2011. So when he sat down to learn Unity from YouTube tutorials in summer 2025, he at least knew how to think through a problem technically.

The early months of Verse Bound were slow going. He hit a wall in August 2025 and put the whole thing down.

He picked it back up after Christmas and by February 2026 it was really moving. The scope ballooned a few times and got pulled back. Eventually it landed somewhere he was happy with. Verse Bound shipped April 2026 — built around a plumber's schedule, mostly off YouTube tutorials and stubbornness.

Jeff doesn't talk about LightSpire in terms of downloads or revenue goals. He'll tell you pretty directly that money has never been what drives him — that's been true with the plumbing business too. He hates working. He loves what he does. There's a difference.

With LightSpire the goal is pretty simple: make Bible-focused games that are actually good to play. Not games that happen to have a verse slapped on them. Games where the faith is woven into what the thing actually is.

He's not chasing anything in particular. He felt called to do this, so he started doing it. A plumber from Milwaukee learning Unity off YouTube, building Bible games in his spare time, seeing where it goes.

That's pretty much the whole story.