a portfolio site and hobby blog by John Welter

WELCOME

Welcome! my name is John Welter, a professional Technical Artist and Gameplay Programmer. This is my Hobby and Portfolio site where you can find what projects I’ve worked on, my own projects, and keep up with projects to come.

I am currently looking for full-time positions back in the game industry, and if you like what you see, check out the About tab for resume and contact info.

Thanks for visiting!

Published Titles

Life is Strange: True Colors

Deck Nine Games | September 2021

My first published title I worked on when I started my career at Deck Nine Games in 2020. I was brought on to take ownership of the player locomotion system, working with animation programming in Unreal for the first time. This included working with a proprietary motion matching system and look-at system, maintaining and expanding on a custom animation state machine in C++, and working with animators to make sure we had the assets setup and exported correctly to match technical needs.

Details of work on Life is Strange: True Colors

The Expanse: A Telltale Series

Deck Nine Games | September 2021

My second title under Deck Nine, and my first that I was able to see from pre-production through post-production and DLC. I designed and programmed the entirety of player control, including animation systems, different locomotion types (walking, mag boots, and zero G flight), the camera rig, custom collisions, and custom IK, for two different characters with drastically different locomotion needs. I also created systems for player VFX, a small DLC puzzlebox, and worked a lot on improving our systems for blending between cinematics and gameplay.

Details of work on The Expanse: A Telltale Series

Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Deck Nine Games | October 2024

After the Expanse, I was thrust again into a mid production LiS game. This entailed a full refactor of the player’s and NPCs’ animation handling, handled mostly through Unreal’s built in solution of animation state machines and control rigs. There was a new challenge in getting stairs animations to work, as well as stopping Max’s messenger bag from clipping during animation blending. I had a lot more of a hand in finding and squashing cinematics bugs, as well as helping to modify the seamless transition solutions to work in a new architecture.

Details of work on Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Ascent of Ashes

Vivid Storm Interactive | July 2025

As my first venture in contract work, I was brought on to help bring this game to early access within a tight schedule. I learned how to use Godot on the fly, and learned a lot about XML data driven architecture. I worked on refactoring the animation system to utilize XML and generate animation trees from scratch at runtime, created a wall-cutaway and room ID system, built the foundations for combat handling, and worked on many rendering effects. I learned how to track performance and optimization using tools like dotTrace, dotMemory, and RenderDoc.

Work details coming soon…!

Current Projects

PictoPuzzler – a Nonogram NES Game Dev Log

Blog Posts

QTE RPG Devlog

QTE RPG Devlog #0: Inspiration

Sometimes, it can be hard to find proper inspiration for a project. I have lots of tiny, disparate ideas here and there, but I can never quite create a vision in my head clear enough to act on. Recently though, I had the chance to play a new game, and a couple ideas finally clicked together for me enough to start a small experiment.

Keep reading
welterolsen's avatar by welterolsen
NES development

Nonogram Dev Log #8: Music Tool

It’s amazing the time you can lose to personal projects when you get like, “employed” or whatever it’s called. Now that that’s out of the way (even if I wish it still was IN the way), I’ve had some time to re-look at the engine – and I’ve got issues. Mainly, I created this game with only a few screens in mind- so few, that I thought I could get away with minimal ROM use by just throwing the full nametables for each game mode plain raw into the ROM. Big mistake, of course. I have ideas to optimize that…

Keep reading
welterolsen's avatar by welterolsen
NES development

Nonogram Dev Log #7: Puzzle Display

It’s fairly common in Nonogram games to display the image of the puzzles you’ve completed. in Mario Picross, it was the final pixel solution, while in Konami Pixel Puzzle, it’s a the full color image. while I COULD do either one, It’s probably best to keep it simple and go with the former’s solution- I already basically create the CHR data info when parsing out the clue numbers, so just repurposing the data will work just fine!

Keep reading
welterolsen's avatar by welterolsen
NES development

Nonogram Dev Log #6: BETTER better tools

One thing I failed to consider (or rather, thought I wasn’t going to run into) was the solvability of my puzzles. sometimes, even with simple seeming puzzles, there can be multiple solutions that can frustrate players who will have to start guessing and checking every move. That’s no fun! I was pointed in the direction of this simple nonogram creation/solving tool on github by Kniffen. Other solvers of it’s kind tend to be much more involved behemoths of code, but those tend to try and actually find EVERY possible solution. the great thing about this solver was that it didn’t…

Keep reading
welterolsen's avatar by welterolsen
Uncategorized

A New Exploration: Wind Waker Water (Preview)

For a little bit now, as I’ve thought about other effects to try and replicate, my mind has been stuck on one thing: the boat VFX in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker I finally sat down recently and begun to try and unravel it by just having a look at the wire frame output in Dolphin and see what I can see. This worked pretty good, at first- I saw what I thought was the right answer and got right to making a solution. as soon as I got something working nicely, I made a gif, posted it…

Keep reading
welterolsen's avatar by welterolsen

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.