Tales from the Minus Lab

A first person adventure game with a unique growing and shrinking mechanic, Tales from the Minus Lab transports players to hidden worlds all within a single room. I am currently acting as audio director for ML, contributing sound design, foley, music implementation, mixing, and audio tech using Unreal Engine 5.

Tales from the Minus Lab poses a unique audio challenge, as each area of the classroom needs to sound familiar yet unique as the player changes size over the course of the game. We are approaching the audio design with a naturalistic style and prioritizing original source recordings for SFX such as footsteps.

01The Brief

Audio direction for a world that shrinks and grows

Tinted Stardust needed a full audio director on Tales from the Minus Lab — a first-person adventure where players change size to reveal hidden worlds within a single classroom. The core challenge: every area has to feel both familiar and completely alien depending on the player's scale, making consistent spatial audio identity harder to achieve than almost any linear game.

02Approach

Naturalistic source, scale-aware design

The team prioritized original recordings over library content — particularly for intimate, tactile sounds like footsteps — to give each size state its own believable texture. The design language treats each shrunk environment as a real place with its own acoustic character rather than a pitch-shifted version of the full-size world.

03Implementation

Wwise + Unreal Engine 5

The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 with Wwise handling the adaptive audio layer. Implementation covers sound design, foley, music, and mixing — with the middleware integration managed directly as part of the audio director scope. Playtesting feeds a continuous optimization loop throughout development.

04Result

In active development

Tales from the Minus Lab is currently in development at Tinted Stardust. The audio framework established early in production continues to guide design decisions as new environments and size-state transitions are added to the game.