I have always been passionate about the crossroads between sound and story. Some of my most vivid childhood memories consist of peeking past the lazy-boy as my dad and sister crept through the crawling corridors of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Shadow Temple. I was totally enveloped in the dungeon atmosphere and can still hear the ominous bellows and trills of the catacombs. In retrospect, I believe that I was mesmerized by how sound in combination with the lighting was really serving to spearhead the ghastly and trepid feeling of the space, conjuring a palpable sense of fear.

Fast forward 17 something years, and I am now working in the industry as an audio designer, fortunate to be able to engage with audio and storytelling on a daily basis - a dream I have always sought. At Skydance Interactive (since July, 2022), I have been able to work with some awesome audio folks on crafting immersive sound within the Virtual Reality gaming sphere. We have been hard at work on Skydance’s Behemoth (Fall 2024), and can’t wait for that game to be released and for folks to be able to experience it. It is an epic adventure, and I am truly proud to be working on the game and can’t wait to talk about it more once it is released.

My first shipped title - as a member of the Skydance Interactive team was The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2 Retribution (released on VR platforms late 2022/early 2023). I really enjoyed working on this game and gained new skills, appreciations, and insights throughout the developmental journey. To name a few particulars, I learned more about the process of sound propagation and designing and placing audio geometry such as spatial volumes and acoustics portals, and leveraging diffraction, obstruction, occlusion, and reverb to achieve an interesting sound propogation system that communicates locations of sounds, distances of emitters, and sizes of rooms. Moreover, I learned more about the VO implementation pipeline; being responsible for the implementation and balancing of over 10,000 NPC and player dialogue/bark lines. Additionally, I learned a ton more about bug fixing and leveraging the Wwise profiler as a vehicle to not only monitor perfromance, but also to triage and identify solutions for audio bugs. Another key experience, was the ability to learn more about designing and recording interactable and lootable grab//drop SFX. I designed a plethora of SFX for new lootable items that gave me a deeper understanding of interaction feedback and how it can be informed and influenced by weight and physics systems via Wwise RTPCs. I also contributed ambience and environmental sfx, mission sfx, and some UI sounds. All of these tasks gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding of designing sounds that leverage VR pillars of kinesthetic input, 360 degree spatiality, and a sense of isolated immersion.

Before joining Skydance Interactive, I was an Audio Design Intern at Obsidian Entertainment (from Jan, 2022 to July, 2022) where I had the special opportunity to work on Avowed (coming 2024), a first-person adventure RPG set within the Pillars of Eternity Universe. Throughout my time at Obsidian, I learned more about designing ambience and emitter content for interior and exterior maps, leveraging states to create dynamic soundscapes, creating, iterating, and testing a myriad of SFX such as destructible and scripted SFX, and triggering audio via blueprinting and proprietary audio tools. At the holistic level, this was really a valuable experience that taught and introduced me to a series of techniques, skills, systems, and frameworks on crafting quality audio at standard of a company like Obsidian who have a tradition of excellence within the RPG domain.

Prior to my endeavors within the industry, I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (graduated in 2022), where I was able to discover interactions and applications of sound within the VR space via intense semester-long collaborative explorations. One project I led, entitled Lyraflo (March 2021 to December 2021), aimed to discover how VR affordances could be leveraged to convey musical concepts that fostered players’ sense of musical curiosity. Our team was composed of Wizard Hsu, myself, Wish Kuo, Yuji Sato, and Jack Wesson. We were a team of music lovers and creators and were bonded through a shared drive to build experiences that felt both fun and informative. We set out on a journey to build three prototypes that each explored dissonance, pitch, chord structures, chord progressions, and tonality (major vs minor). Working on this project was a memorable, unforgettable experience that taught me the value of leveraging a transformational design framework model to inform design decision making, the importance of paper prototyping and playtesting to evaluate concepts, and also the power of digging into experiential and VR tactics as a means of fostering a satisfying player experience that has the power to be informative while entertaining. Another pitch project, entitled VESP (September 2020 to May 2021), was a project I worked on alongside four other individuals - Lewis Koh, Stefani Taskas, Sofia Videva, and Jack Wesson. The project aimed to investigate how animal sensation could be experienced and approximated within the VR space. We built four prototypes exploring echolocation via the bat, electro magnetoreception via the bee, chromatophore camouflaging via the squid, and infrasonic sound via the elephant. The project was an excellent opportunity to tackle and learn how VR inputs (through my lens, sonic inputs) could be used as canvases to map and bring otherwise extraordinary, impossible to perceive animal senses, to the human palette through the power of embodiment, metaphor, and extrapolation.

Prior to my time at the ETC, I did my undergraduate studies at Indiana University’s game design program (graduated 2020), where I was able to begin exploring sound within game and immersive media contexts via collaborative projects and engagements. At IU, I became passionate about audio design, and it is where I began to realize that a career in game audio is what was my dream.

In addition to audio design, story, and games, I love spending time with my wife and family, rock climbing, playing the guitar, writing songs, and searching for the best coffee around town.