REDSHIFT | Luke Whited

Personal Project

REDSHIFT(2025)

Role: Solo developer - design, programming, narrative, art direction, audio integration, release, and community
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Platform: Windows on Steam
Release: Sep 2, 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. Built as a focused single-sitting experience, Redshift delivers its story through environmental details, radio calls, and a living soundscape.

Notable Results:

Reached the top of Steam’s New and Trending free games and surpassed 80,000 lifetime units in the first month.
Highlighted by Rochester Institute of Technology in article
Very Positive reviews on Steam. (Bar some reviews from trolls.)
Submitted to Independent Game Festival (Awaiting results, expected Q2 2026.)

What I Built:

As a solo developed project, everything was built and shipped by myself. Besides music and art assets, this entire game and all of it's systems were programmed and shipped by myself. It is impossible to go into explicit detail on a portfolio about the incredible challenges and complex programming that went into it, but

I shipped Redshift end to end as a solo developer. Aside from licensed music and art assets, every feature, system, and build is my own work. A full postmortem would be pages long, so here are the highlights.

Core mechanic: eyes-closed REDSHIFT layer built with a custom post-process, input gating, and world-state swaps.
Interaction framework for dual-reality objects, clues, and gated puzzles
Narrative layer: dispatcher radio, timed interrupts, branching beats, and fail-safes.
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 for two distinct outcomes.
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.