Feel-first design
Movement, torch beam, footstep audio, and battery drain are tuned together. Postprocessing adds vignette, grain, bloom, and chromatic aberration to lock in the mood.
Game development
Soulstack Studio
In-house game development built around atmosphere and tool-first production.
Torch In Darkness is deliberately small in scope. Near-zero ambient light, a single warm camera-mounted spotlight, footstep audio, and a battery model that gives the torch real weight. Everything outside the beam falls close to black.
The wider studio direction is tool-first. Levels, gameplay data, and content packs are authored through editors that double as production tools, so each project leaves behind reusable systems rather than throwaway code.
Highlights
- React Three Fiber, drei, zustand, and post-processing pipeline
- First-person controls with pointer lock and footstep audio
- Vitest unit tests and Playwright end-to-end smoke tests
- Tool-first content pipeline for levels and gameplay packs
- Atmosphere-led design over scope creep
Current project
Torch In Darkness.
A first-person React Three Fiber MVP about one thing. Walking through a dark interior with a torch and getting the feel right.
Modern web stack
React 19, React Three Fiber, drei, zustand, and post-processing on Vite. WASD movement, mouse look on click, and torch toggle on F.
Tested by default
Vitest unit tests run on every build. Playwright drives an end-to-end smoke test against the production preview server.
Direction
Tool-first, atmosphere-led.
Each project leaves behind reusable systems. Levels, gameplay data, and content packs are authored through editors that double as production tools, so a finished build is always paired with a real authoring pipeline.