V1RAL — Co-Founder & Audio/Design Generalist on a Boomer Shooter FPS

The Project

V1RAL (working title: Project Black) is a boomer-shooter-style first-person shooter with modernized movement mechanics including wallrunning, wallclimbing, sliding, and gravity inversion. The game features a single-player campaign following C3V1N, a malfunctioning cleaner robot who breaks free from a facility controlled by an AI antagonist called “Mother.” The tone blends fast-paced retro FPS action with dark comedy — recurring characters like “Tube” (a pompous, useless self-proclaimed ally) and absurd enemy encounters provide humor throughout.

The full campaign spans 8 levels with multiple boss fights, branching player choices, environmental puzzles, and a comedic narrative running throughout. The game features a custom real-time sound occlusion system paired with convolution reverb — a technically sophisticated audio solution for an indie project of this scale.

My Role

I co-founded this project with one other developer (a UE4 generalist programmer) in early 2020. The team grew to ~5 people after about 6 months, adding two more programmers and a 3D artist/animator. I stayed on the project for approximately 3 years (2020–2022).

There was no formal title or hierarchy — as co-founder I filled whatever role the project needed. In practice, I was the primary person responsible for all audio design and implementation, narrative/story writing, and level design documentation, while also contributing to game design decisions and Blueprint programming. I coordinated with an external music composer, managed audio mixing across the team, and captured video footage for the game trailer.

This was my first game development project — I entered with zero prior experience in Unreal Engine, sound design, level design, or game writing, and learned every discipline on the job while contributing to a live project.

What I Built

Custom Real-Time Sound Occlusion System

The most technically distinctive system I built on this project. It dynamically occludes sounds based on environmental geometry and player position, creating realistic audio behavior where sounds are muffled or blocked by walls and obstacles — all built entirely in UE4 Blueprints with no C++ dependencies.

The system evolved over multiple years. The initial implementation (2021) handled basic occlusion. In 2022, I added distance-based prioritization to manage performance with many simultaneous sound sources, and a dedicated source component to handle multiple sounds per emitter. This prioritization was critical — without it, the system would attempt occlusion calculations for every sound source regardless of relevance, which didn’t scale as enemy count and level complexity grew.

The occlusion system was paired with convolution reverb (replacing earlier algorithmic reverb) and full sound spatialization setup to create a cohesive spatial audio experience across game levels.

Blueprint Audio Component Architecture

I designed and built a modular, inheritance-based audio system: a base Blueprint audio component with specialized child components for 4+ enemy types, plus a separate dedicated audio component for the player character. Each child component tailored audio behavior to its entity — different enemy types had different voice, combat, and death sounds, while the player component handled the full locomotion audio suite.

This architecture was built in 2021 as enemy variety increased and the project needed a scalable way to manage audio behavior per entity type, demonstrating object-oriented design principles in a visual scripting context.

Sound Design & Implementation (50+ SFX)

I was responsible for all sound design on the project. This covered:

Weapons: SMG, shotgun (design, implementation, and revision passes)
Player locomotion: Footsteps, jump, double jump, dodge, slide, wallrun — each with distinct sounds matching the movement system’s feel
Combat & gore: Hit impacts, enemy deaths, scientist deaths
Environment: Ambient sound manager, elevator doors, pickups
Enemy voices: Vocalizations for multiple enemy types
UI/system: Respawn voicelines, tutorial voicelines (generated using Replica AI)

Beyond individual SFX, I performed multiple mixing passes across the full project to maintain audio clarity during high-intensity combat with dozens of simultaneous sources. I also diagnosed and resolved audio concurrency issues to ensure stable performance under heavy sound load, and implemented a sound modulation system for dynamic audio parameter changes driven by gameplay state.

Narrative Design — 8-Level Campaign

I co-wrote the overarching game story and authored the majority of the campaign’s level scripts:

Tutorial/Introduction — Mother’s introduction sequence, the testing facility, and the gravity inversion incident that sets the story in motion
Weapons Lab — First combat encounters after C3V1N’s escape
Hive — Enemy-dense environment with escalating encounter design
Sewers — Post-discard sequence where the player loses all weapons and must navigate a partially collapsed underground complex
Space Port — Large-scale environment with environmental storytelling
Bank — Encounter design with environmental puzzles
Pre-boss fight sequence — Narrative buildup to the final confrontation
Deep Blue encounters — Scripts for interactions with a mysterious in-game entity

I also documented key characters and their relationships — the AI antagonist Mother, the protagonist C3V1N, and the entity Deep Blue — establishing the narrative foundation for the full campaign. The story supports two distinct endings and weaves dark comedy throughout via characters like Tube.

To support the project’s music, I produced a condensed version of the game story and narrative summaries for an external music composer, giving them the context needed to score the game.

Level Design

I designed and blocked out multiple game levels:

Tutorial level — Full blockout and scripted sequence introducing movement, combat, and the gravity inversion pickup through a narrative framing in a robot assembly factory
Combat prototype levels — Multiple test levels for iterating on combat feel and encounter design, which I playtested and revised
Sewers level — Full blockout for a campaign level with distinct pacing (no weapons, navigation-focused)

For levels I didn’t block out personally, I wrote detailed level scripts specifying arena layouts, encounter flow, puzzle mechanics, enemy placement, dialogue triggers, player choice branches, and narrative integration — providing the design blueprint for other team members to build from.

Additional Systems

Volume controls / options widget — Implemented audio volume controls in the game’s options UI
Forcefield material — Created a visual shader/material for in-game forcefields
General Blueprint programming — Contributed to various gameplay systems during the project’s foundation year

Key Challenges & Solutions

Learning everything from zero: I entered this project with no game development experience whatsoever. I simultaneously learned UE4, Blueprint programming, sound design, level design, and narrative writing — all while contributing meaningfully to a live project with a small team counting on each contribution. This demanded rapid self-education and comfort with shipping work while still learning.

Real-time sound occlusion in Blueprints: Building a performant real-time occlusion system entirely in Blueprints (rather than C++) was a significant technical challenge. The system needed to handle multiple sound sources simultaneously without tanking performance. The solution involved distance-based prioritization (only processing occlusion for sounds within a relevant range) and a dedicated source component architecture that could manage multiple sounds per emitter efficiently.

Audio concurrency at scale: As enemy count and level complexity grew, too many simultaneous sounds competed for resources and audibility. Solving this required fixing concurrency issues, building the prioritization system, and performing multiple mixing passes to ensure the audio landscape remained clear and readable during intense combat.

Ambitious scope with a tiny team: The campaign calls for 8 full levels with multiple boss fights, branching encounters, environmental puzzles, a comedic narrative, and specialized mechanics (gravity inversion, wallrunning). Delivering meaningful progress on this scope with a team of 2–5 people required extreme versatility and pragmatic prioritization — which is why I ended up working across audio, narrative, level design, game design, and programming simultaneously.

Sustaining a multi-year passion project: The project was developed entirely during free time, and progress was sometimes very slow. Maintaining momentum, creative direction, and team alignment over 3 years of part-time development tests discipline and commitment in ways that are distinct from a structured studio environment.

Tools & Tech

Unreal Engine 4 (Blueprints), Reaper, Ableton Live Suite, Replica AI (voice generation), Convolution Reverb, Sound Occlusion, Blueprint Audio Components