Devhouse’s Jim Welch Can’t Get Away From the “Fun Stuff”

Devhouse was founded “really because I wanted to do more in games. This was after I started freelancing, and I said, ‘Okay I'm making music for all these other games. What if I'm in my own game?’”—Jim Welch

Last summer, Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, recorded a podcast with Jim Welch, Founder and CEO of The Devhouse Agency. Based near Dallas, Texas, Devhouse is mostly a co-dev studio, meaning that it partners with other studios and publishers to help them complete videogame projects as an integrated extension of their core teams.

Clients have included Disney, Netflix, Meta, Samsung, EA Sports, Paramount, Mixed Realms, and others. Devhouse has finished 50+ projects in the decade or so that it’s been in business. Devhouse employs about 20 people and specializes in Unity and Unreal Engine projects.

In their June 2025 podcast, Welch and Posner covered a lot of ground, including how Welch entered the game industry; his decision to start a business; running a company and managing a team in today’s turbulent market; the design and development of a first-party game, Trash Heist; and Welch’s nasty rock ‘n’ roll licks.

There was enough there that Design Desk broke the content into two parts. Below, we’ll cover Welch’s unusual path into game dev work, offer color on some of Devhouse’s co-dev projects, and swan dive into Trash Heist. We’ll wrap up next week with Welch’s tips, tricks, and advice on running a co-dev studio and managing teams, and an examination of how AI tools impact how Devhouse was operating at the time.

The first question Posner put to Welch involved his break into gaming. Posner knew music played a role in it, and he asked Welch to color in between the lines.

“I really see myself,” Welch reminisced, “as a creative person…I run a business, of course, but it’s really from the heart of creativity that it exists.”

“At an early age, music was really what drew me in. There was a brief period where, you know, as a very young kid, I was like, ‘Well, maybe I'll go into theater or music.’ And there was a point where the classes overlapped and I to pick, and I picked music.”

“I learned guitar,” Welch continued. “I was playing in bands…When you work with other people, like, in a band, you find that your ambition levels don’t always align. And so that kind of pushed me towards more composition, where I could maybe have a little more control of the output. Whereas a band, you’re very reliant on your bandmates.”

“I went to school for music composition out in Oregon. And then I…worked for Funimation Entertainment, which is where I was doing music and sound design, both, for their trailers. So yeah, like, all the Dragon Ball Z trailers.”

Dragon Ball Z is an iconic Japanese anime series that Toei Animation produced. Funimation licensed the rights to the series, which featured a lot of epic martial arts battles, and the series became a huge hit in the U.S. Eventually, Funimation was rolled into Sony’s Crunchyroll brand.

On the podcast, Welch proudly showed off a Krillin toy (Krillin is a key Dragon Ball Z character).

Posner wondered if Welch had grown up “loving Dragon Ball Z” or if he could shed more light on how he landed that sound design and trailer composition gig.

“Early on I wanted to play and be a performing musician,” Welch said, nodding. “I did that for a number of years” but his interests eventually “shifted more to, like, film. I think film is where a lot of composers see themselves. You can do film. You can be a teacher. That’s another common path out of music school.”

“The anime thing came by chance, you know? That was film adjacent. It’s like trailers and things. And when I looked for work, there was an opening…”

And that’s our opening!

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From Composing Game Trailers to Co-Dev

I just kept saying “Yes,” and I was overloaded. I was like, “All right, I just need to clone myself.” I hired another generalist engineer, and did that for the first three hires or so. Then I brought on a project manager. I kind of started slowly building a company based on the biggest pain point.—Jim Welch

Early in their discussion, Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, asked Devhouse’s Founder and CEO, Jim Welch, when he decided to strike out on his own in a co-dev direction.

“While I was working at Funimation,” Welch recalled, he’d written “music on the side for games, which, you know, that’s kind of a transition from being more of a film, linear media composer, to a game composer.”

That work was “on the side initially, then full-time freelance,” continued Welch. In time, he started attending “little game jams and, like, experimenting…I ended up doing a long stint, or a somewhat long stint, as a coder…I was hired as an engineer after kind of teaching myself to code through game jams.”

“I did that for a number of years before I said, ‘Okay, I think I can run a studio on my own,’” he added. “It was just me when I stopped working for other people. I was Devhouse until I hired more people. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I just got a bunch of money, let me hire 20 people.’”

The bootstrapping strategy has paid off. Devhouse has contributed to many high-profile, successful projects in the past decade.

Devhouse recently did some 3D animation and cutscene work for EA Sports’ Madden NFL 26 and 27, for example. Ditto for EA Sports’ College Football 26 and 27.

They’re currently working with Mixed Realms to get 13Z: The Zodiac Trials over the finish line. The action roguelike title is slated to hack-and-slash its way onto Steam, Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in January.

Posner asked Welch to open up about his first hire.

“I would think about it differently today,” Welch responded. “Today, it might be on the marketing side, and it might be on the community building side because it's just so important.”

“That's if you're making your own game,” he clarified. “Devhouse's core business is making games for others. Even then, maybe a salesperson or someone on the business side. What I actually did was just try to hire another one of myself. I was an engineer. I was, like, a generalist, and I would be hired to help teams.”

It was “like, ‘I don't have enough hours in the day to code all this and need another engineer.’ ‘I don't have enough people to talk to this client…let me hire a project manager.’ So yeah, right now, it's just whatever the biggest pain point of the business is, but gradually getting more sophisticated with those hiring decisions.”

Posner asked Welch how he juggled work on client projects and the first-party game that Posner was aware was in the pipeline.

“Client work always needs to come first because it's what pays the bills and keeps the lights on,” Welch replied flatly. “We need to survive long enough as a studio to make a hit…We've made some games before. We recently released a VR game called Math Quest…We need to do client work to stick around, but also you have a responsibility, right? Someone's giving you money to build something. You need that to be top of mind and most important to you.”

Math Quest VR: The Search for the Crown of Calculation was released on Steam and Meta SideQuest for $15 last April.

“The way we logistically balance that, though,” Welch continued, “is basically having dedicated staff members who work on our internal project. That way, it's pretty easy to say, ‘Okay, who's available for this project?’ You kind of just pretend those people aren't on your team and they're just not a resource you can use.”

“Only in, like, a crunch-type experience,” clarified Welch, “where we’re like, ‘Oh there's a red alert, this thing broke, the client has a presentation…’ Those are the only cases where we really have to pull those people.”

“The other balancing element is my time. I spend a lot of extra hours and extra evenings writing code and working on the game. Sometimes too much. Sometimes I spend a lot of my days doing it. That's where, like, the sales start to suffer and I need to pull myself away from the fun stuff.”

It hasn’t all been fun and games.

Sometimes projects with world-class IP have flopped.

At the end of last year, Devhouse released a UEFN island that it worked on in tandem with Paramount, SpongeBob Party. According to Fortnite.gg, the experience sunk like a stone to Bikini Bottom. In fact, it only took about a week to plunge from >5,500 average daily players to double digits, and it hasn’t rebounded. Ouch.

To be fair, Devhouse is far from alone in launching UEFN Islands that nosedive on player counts. As Design Desk chronicled in January, Alex Seropian’s Look North World studio invested in several UEFN islands that landed like lead balloons.

Who’s Down for a Trash Heist?

I remember sitting down with the team around [a] whiteboard and being like, “Hey, here's what we want to do.” I don't recall how it became Trash Heist. I think someone literally just said it. And we’re like, “That's a funny name. Let's call it Trash Heist.”—Jim Welch

“Why, in this time of turbulence in the market, do you think it's the right time to be looking at your own IP?” Posner asked Welch shortly after the topic of first-party games was broached.

“Two reasons,” Welch responded. “One, we've always wanted to…I always like to make my own things. One regret I have about my music career is I never made time to make my own albums.”

“When I was a teenager, I made, like, some rock stuff, but it was, you know, bad teenager music. As an adult, after I got good at it, I never made time because there was always a client.”

“Same with games,” Welch continued. “I've always wanted to just make my own stuff because…as a creative person that's something that brings me joy. So, that's the first reason: It makes me happy.”

“The other reason, from a business perspective, is diversification. It can be an exhausting hamster wheel being in the service business because you always have to go find more work. And it's always, like, keeping the funnel full. It never stops.”

“We love the side of the business of supporting other studios, but it would be nice not to, like, live or die on this quarter's, you know, interests,” he continued. “The game industry is in a weird place, you know? That impacts how the market performs. And you have to adapt, and it's tough. Diversifying with our own titles will hopefully give us some other revenue streams.”

Got it…

So, whatcha got cookin’?

“We're building a sort of Jackbox-style experience,” Welch explained. “It's really the only game out there that does second screen, except for Sunderfolk, which just came out.”

Jackbox is long-standing series of popular party games from the eponymous studio. Dreamhaven’s Sunderfolk indeed launched in 2Q 2025.

“Sunderfolk is like a D&D style second screen experience,” Welch continued. Devhouse’s title is “a jackbox-style game called Trash Heist. In Trash Heist you are performing a heist, as little trash animals. So, like, raccoons and rats and possums and crows. The gameplay is sort of akin to mini golf. You take turns sort of lining up your animal's trajectory. And you can, like, knock other animals around and mess up their shots.”

“We're in kind of late prototyping, early pre-production,” he elaborated. “We're playing with the idea of like, ‘How much is it co-op?’ ‘How much is it competitive?’ [We’re] leaning a little more into competitive because we have a lot more fun, and get more rowdy when we do that. But that has its own marketing challenges.”

Devhouse’s indie game development studio and publishing arm is called Something Special Games. About a year ago, they posted a YouTube video with some insightful dev notes if you’re interested. The nutshell version is that Trash Heist, at that point, looked like a chaotic, physics-based party game about mischievous critters who steel garbage—from trash cans and other players.

Posner asked how the concept came about.

“We've done some client work in the past that has used QR code technology to, like, join into games,” began Welch. “We knew the tech stack of, like ‘How do you actually pull off the second screen joining through WebGL experiences?’ Because we knew that, we're like, ‘Well, let's leverage’” that to do something interesting.

The question soon morphed into “how do we succeed where others wouldn't? And that's often leveraging…special information or special skills. So that was, like, the foundation…What can we make based off that?”

“It kind of snowballs, like, these little ideas,” continued Welch. We had an idea of “a second screen experience. ‘What can we do?’ ‘Oh, we're characters. It's a heist.’ ‘Oh, Trash Heist. Okay, well, now we're trash animals.’”

Posner expressed skepticism and asked how Welch planned to approach distribution.

Welch understood Posner’s concern.

“The easy path that you just assume is, like, ‘Oh, we'll release a game on Steam….[That’s] relatively low effort.’ It's similar to the app stores, like Google Play and iOS App Store.”

“They're very democratized and easy to get on to. So that's where we started. And now, this particular game, it leverages both the WebGL platform for your controller—basically your phone that controls your inputs—[and] the actual game…the 3D world, that all is, like, a proper Windows executable file that would live on Steam.”

“At GDC this year [2025], Jackbox had a talk,” Welch continued. “They were talking about how they want to be on smart TVs and how they want you to be able to, you know, as you're scrolling through the apps of your smart TV, see Drawful pop up, for example.”

The GDC Festival of Gaming is a game dev conference held every March in San Francisco. Drawful is a is a drawing party game that’s part of The Jackbox Party Pack.

“That definitely got us talking,” he told Posner. “They're changing how they deploy…Do we want to deploy directly to smart TVs?”

“We're still looking at the traditional paths: Steam and console. And then, of course, whoever buys it, the other people can just scan their codes.”

Posner wondered if WebGL was up to the task that Welch described.

“Our studio does both Unreal and Unity development,” he responded. “This particular game is built in Unity, and Unity 6 has brought back WebGL…It's always been there but it's been under-supported…Now, [with] Unity formally supporting WebGL again, [that] has been a big benefit to companies wanting to build on the web.”

For the record, Trash Heist has since debuted on Samsung Smart TVs. It’s available via an ad-supported, interactive cloud gaming channel, GAMELOOP.

Images of Samsung’s GAMELOOP service courtesy of a Cloud Dosage article.

Trash Heist supports up to eight local players. It’s described as a “physics-driven slapstick… chaotic party game.”

“Go hunt that down,” Welch implored Posner. “We definitely want everyone playing Trash Heist!”

Come back next week for more Design Desk insights about Devhouse’s operations and what Welch thought about AI in 2Q 2025.