New Game++
This is the first blog post for the last year, so a lot of updates are in order.
MECHS ON MARS
With my return to college in September, I put development on Mechdivers on hold until I graduate, with my game development focus shifting in October to a first-person stealth horror game. This game would end up being my year-end capstone project, which I would spent May-August designing all of the sound for. Since the sound design is still in progress, I’ll leave that mostly for a later post for when it’s done, but in brief, I’ve recorded some pretty cool stuff for this project and it’s already sounding fantastic.
Mechdivers went through a few major and minor updates from the last dev log a year ago to my most recent commit on September 29th. The main updates were broad, minor changes, like updating objective strings for more variety, balancing encounters, adding contextual prompts depending on control input, and cutting settings that were going unused. I was focusing on bringing it as close to a polished state as I could with its current content, and the majority of that was made up of smaller fixes. On the bigger side, I made vast performance optimizations across both levels with more dynamic loading systems and disabling AI when they weren’t active, I made another visual pass of both levels, added a tutorial, and, importantly, I did a visual overhaul of the main menu, taking after the Halo 2 menu.
My final few pushes included many translations and QA fixes on the localization side, better scaling for the French translation and icons, and menu adjustments, and with that, development on my little mecha project hit the brakes to make way for another game.
ISOLATED WITH AN ALIEN
Nox is being developed in Unreal Engine 5, an engine I’ve tinkered with over the years but hadn’t committed to a full project in until now, and similarly it’s using Wwise as its audio engine and middleware. I spent October to December really nailing down the design, planning out content needed, how to maximize the quality and variety of sounds I can showcase, and setting up the player controller exactly how I wanted. Once I had the player feeling good to control, I started grey-boxing levels right away. With Mechdivers, my biggest limiters on production were on the art and level design side, with grey-boxing and replacing everything with environment art taking a frustrating amount of time when I also had to make everything, especially when I just wanted to move on to the soundscape, so as a result I opted to rely on Fab asset packs for the visuals. I was pleasantly surprised with how quick grey-boxing was in Unreal on an actual project, so these two factors together made level design relatively quick, at least compared to Mechdivers.
After spending January to May wrapping up all three levels and making them play well start to finish, I started work on the sound design. I’m pretty happy with the level design, focusing hard on having varied environments, dramatic lighting, and as many opportunities for stealth and switching up the soundscape as possible.
BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS
As a quick recap of everything I ended off the last Mechdivers dev log with: on May 28th 2026 I released my third album, Beyond Pale Morning Fog; my work on Skywind is also taking a break until I wrap up school; and importantly, I’m about halfway through my third and final semester of my post-graduate program in sound design. It’ll be nice to be on a break from music for a bit, but I’ve already got ideas for a next EP and album, and I’m happy to put those off for a bit to relax.
I’ll put out a big post about the sound design in Nox and how everything came together later in August, so you’ll have that to look forward to. In the meantime, thank you once again for reading.
