Timothy M. Wells

PhD student · Software engineer · Filmmaker · Ordained minister

I am a software engineer and a computer science PhD student at the University of New Mexico, where I work on computer graphics, extended reality, human-computer interaction, and robotics — and the places they overlap.

Before pursuing my PhD, I spent four years shipping production software — APIs, search infrastructure, and data pipelines at Amazon and IMDb, and e-commerce analytics at Tadpull. Outside of that I build video games, write, and cut video. I am also ordained with the Universal Life Church, so I officiate weddings, and I suppose funerals are on the table too.

See my work Download résumé (PDF)

Selected work

A few things worth starting with

Novateria: The New World

Game designer & developer

A party-based, turn-based RPG set in a fantasy version of the colonial New World — and the largest game project I have taken on.

Novateria follows a company of adventurers across dangerous, half-mapped territory in search of a lost colony. It takes its cues from Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur's Gate: you control up to four characters at once, and combat is turn-based with a deep pool of items and abilities.

The project is in active development in Unity. I am looking for volunteers on every front — art, code, and design — so get in touch if you would like to be part of it.

Unity
C#

Project site

Stele

Designer & developer

A handout generator for tabletop games. Type your text, pick a material, and get back a weathered inscription or an aged document — chipped marble, scorched paper, faded runes.

Start from a medium — marble, sandstone, granite, slate, clay tablet, bronze plaque, wood, paper, parchment, papyrus — then choose a colour, a shape, and a hand to write in, anywhere from Roman capitals and blackletter to copperplate, typewriter, runes, and cuneiform.

The damage is the point. One dial ages the whole piece, or you can layer specific kinds: chips, cracks, lichen, verdigris, burns, water stains, ink blots, tears, folds. Fade eats into the writing itself, and a brush lets you paint wear exactly where you want it. Wrap words in [[…]] to mark them for destruction or {{…}} to keep damage off them, so the unreadable parts of a handout are the parts you chose.

It all renders in the browser: the weathering is GLSL shader work over a WebGL canvas, with no image library and no server behind it. Finished pieces export as 300 DPI PNGs — transparent, if they are headed for a virtual tabletop — or as multi-page ZIPs, full-size PDFs, or a shareable link.

TypeScript
WebGL
GLSL
Vite

Try it Source DM Tools shelf

The Stele editor, with a carved marble epitaph beside its controls

A burnt, water-stained letter generated by Stele, with part of the text lost to the flames

Kart Racing Game

Game designer & developer

A browser kart racer through a procedurally generated world, written in raw WebGL with no game engine underneath it.

Everything runs in the browser and everything is built from the ground up: primitives, hierarchical modeling, Blinn-Phong lighting, texture and bump mapping, plus collision detection, kart physics, and particle effects.

Each level is generated with randomized terrain, trees, obstacles, orbs, road segments, and clouds. Clear a level and the next one raises the difficulty by scattering more orbs to collect and more obstacles to dodge.

WebGL
JavaScript

Play it Source

The Territory's Best

Writer & director · 2018

Olympus International Film Festival — Best Short Western

A short western about an outlaw hunting down the legendary fastest gun in Montana Territory, shot on a historic homestead in Harrison, Montana.

I wrote the script with the Montana State University Screenwriting Club, pitched it to the MSU faculty as a senior film, and directed the production. We shot on location in February — the coldest month Montana has to offer, and a windy one.

It went on to win Best Short Western at the Olympus International Film Festival, screen as an official selection at the Bigfork Independent Film Festival, and pick up nine Tracy Award nominations.

Watch it IMDb