Shadow Frames
An old man with dementia. An abandoned pub. You navigate by sound alone.
The Game
I picked this project because horror sound design is where creativity has no limits. Every semester at DAE we vote on pitches from game design students. Shadow Frames was a horror concept and I wanted in. Four months as the sole audio designer on the team.
An elderly man with dementia wanders through an abandoned 1960s Irish pub. Everything is black and white. Anomalies keep appearing - levitating glasses, spinning chairs, drifting shadows - each one a fragment of memory. His son, his daughter, moments from years ago. At the end he finds his son hooked up to an IV, drinking. Beyond saving. He calls an ambulance, and the game just... stops. You never find out what happens.
There's no HUD, no markers, nothing on screen telling you where to go. Mute the game and you're blind. Every creak, whisper, and rattle tells you which direction to walk. You follow the sound, photograph the anomaly, pin it to a board, and piece the story together. No music during exploration - just the pub: wood settling, clock ticking, wind through gaps. When music shows up, something's actually happening.
Multi-school collaboration: game devs at Howest DAE, a writer from RITCS working on her master's, and a composer from the Royal Conservatory of Ghent, also finishing her master's. I wrote a 49-page Sound Bible so anyone joining the project could get up to speed. Then I built the dynamic music system around the stems the composer sent me.
Gameplay
Put headphones on. Walk through the pub, listen to the footsteps change on different surfaces, hear the anomalies spawn around you. This is what the game actually sounds like.
Audio Systems
Footstep Detection
Wood floors, tiles, concrete, and creaky boards that groan when you step wrong. A physics line-trace fires downward from the player's feet each step - the Physical Material from the hit maps to a Wwise Switch. The payoff: level designers can drop a new surface type into the editor and it just works. No code changes, no asking me.
Enemy Proximity
Something is always stalking you in the pub. As it gets closer, dark drones and heavy breathing fade in through RTPC. Early on, when the enemy hovered near the trigger boundary, the audio toggled on and off every frame - a horrible machine-gun stutter instead of smooth tension. I added a hysteresis state machine with dual thresholds (start at 70%, stop at 60%). That 10% gap means it can't flicker. Problem gone.
Anomaly System
Three audio stages per anomaly. First an alert burst when it spawns - half a second, just enough to make you stop walking. Then a directional hint so you can tell which room it's in: a chair scraping, glass clinking, something specific to that anomaly. Then a sustained loop until you photograph it. Every anomaly sounds different. You find them by ear - there's nothing on screen.
Camera System
Raise the Polaroid and everything goes through a 3kHz low-pass filter. Your breathing gets loud. The shutter has the full mechanical sequence - click, flash, film advance. Capture an anomaly and you hear a reversed whisper as confirmation. Miss, and you just wasted a shot. Run out of film and it's a hollow click. Reloading takes 5 seconds where you can't move. The enemy doesn't wait.
Trailer
I directed and edited this trailer myself. Picked the shots, timed the cuts to the music, mixed the audio.
Wwise Architecture
Master Mixer Hierarchy
DataAsset Configurations
RTPC Curves & States
Event List
Sound Bible
49 pages covering every sound in the game -- footstep logic, anomaly sequences, enemy proximity rules, the dynamic music system. Three schools, people joining mid-project. Without this document, I'd be explaining the same things over and over.