2025

Summary

REDSHIFT is a short first-person psychological horror where closing your eyes reveals a hidden layer of reality called the REDSHIFT. You play as Samuel Chase, a field technician for Northline Communications, sent to bring a long-abandoned military relay back online at Tower 7. Powering the site awakens something that twists the world, and you decide whether to run or face the tower. It is a focused, single-sitting experience that tells its story through environmental details, radio calls, and a strange setting.

Two versions

I built the 2025 Early Access release (0.1.0) alone. Version 1.0, released on Steam on October 30, 2026, was rebuilt with a team through RIT's MAGIC Maker program, where I was senior programmer, producer and creative lead. That team was four developers, plus additional artists, voice actors and other contributors. I own REDSHIFT and Gravity Interactive, the company that develops and publishes it on Steam. The Steam page now links to 1.0.

Notable results

• Reached the top of Steam’s New and Trending free games and has passed 99,200 lifetime units.
• Highlighted in a Rochester Institute of Technology article.
• Mostly Positive rating on Steam (78% of 112 user reviews, November 2026).
• Accepted to the MAGIC Maker program.

What I built

For the 2025 release I built REDSHIFT alone, covering design, narrative, art direction, audio integration, release, and community. Outside of music and art assets, I programmed the entire game and shipped it myself.

• Team production: led the programming side of a four-person developer team through the 1.0 rebuild, planned the work and milestones, and coordinated artists, voice actors, and other contributors.
• Player, game flow, and menus: the first-person character, player controller, game mode, main menu, pause menu, loading screens, and credits.
• Quest system and quest UI, including the final terminal.
• Interaction system: keypads, keycards, doors, power-locked doors, and the elevator.
• Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 level work: geometry, navigation mesh fixes, and layer audio switches.
• Post-process and visual effects: the REDSHIFT post-process stack, glitch and blindness shaders, and render-target effects.
• Dialogue and narrative: a dialogue priority system, voice memos, lore tracking on the pause menu, and captions.
• Settings: brightness, gamma, and colorblind options, plus the audio settings.
• Debug and test tools, including a debug menu and a spawner.
• Audio integration and mixing with interference cues, proximity stingers, and dynamic zones for each eye state.
• Level design and scripting for Tower 7 approach, interior flow, pacing, and tension ramps.
• Ending logic and state tracking, including the bad and burning endings and their achievements.
• Accessibility and UX: graphics presets, audio sliders, high-contrast visibility option, and input tweaks.
• Dynamic quality settings for scalability so the game can work on a variety of devices.
• Performance and QA: profiling, LOD and visibility passes, collision and lighting fixes, and hotfix pipeline.
• Steam integration: store setup, achievements, depots, and build delivery.
• Release operations: patches, player support, community updates, and long-term maintenance.
• Hotfixes after the 1.0 release.