Are We Alive

A short horror action experience with a full symphonic score and home brewed sound design.

Story:

You just moved in to a house in the country side. You need to get the key that your neighbor borrowed. He left something for you in the basement and you aren't feeling too well... Are you going mad or is there something even more sinister at play?

A Three Part Short Novella of an Experience. Will you unravel the mystery?

Inspirations include Invasion of the body snatchers and Romero's Night of the Living Dead as well as themes from current world events ie. UFO's, AI, War, Geopolitics.

Features:

* Unreal Cinematic Game Experience
* Full Symphonic Score with Adaptive combat elements using Wwise
* Full Voice Acting (Me being the player and designed modified for rest of characters)
* Use gun and grenades to kill off an invasion with glorious vfx explosions and gooey purple blood(You can gib the soldiers ala quake)
* Open ended unraveling of an evil plot at play as the world around you is crumbling.
* Homebrewed Sound Design
* A Creeping up on you Horror Atmosphere

Behind The Scenes Background:

This started out with me composing the music for the game, a symphonic suite titled Country Madness, which forms the basis for all the different parts in the game. Also, it revolved around me combining fieldrecordings and making a sound design demo, plus learning more Wwise middleware, which evolved into a full blown storytelling endeavour / experience of a game that I worked on in Unreal.

This work happens mostly when my kids were asleep and me just gotten out of employment in the games industry after three years...  :P Worked at Rightsized Games before developing Undead Inc. in UE4.

One thing I wanted to do for the game was model my house as well as practicing different stuff in the various principles in game dev. throughout Art, Sound, Programming, UI, development in Unreal in General. All in all, that is my real life house in the game with my studio in the basement. 

It's a portfolio piece, a keeping myself occupied, being creative sort of thing. experimenting in Unreal, scripting away and doing some Embergen VFX and much more, and me telling a story of a man's drift into madness as the simple world he exists in is destroyed from outside and within. 

I hope someone will find as much enjoyment in this experience as I had putting it together.

All The Best,

Max Robert Bünsow 2026

PS:

Check out the Devlog Videos Behind The Music and Game Development Here

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWjKHVlJTIJG0sbsNzfG5uMhI_fpvRm5U&si=ZrXS1ZMO...

Keyboard Controls:

WASD and Mouse - Movement

RMB - Shoot

E - Interact with objects Pickup Etc.

M - Map n Compass (Displays approximately where you are, so use Compass)

G - Grenades

Software Used:

Engines:

Unreal Engine

Wwise Middleware

Sounddesign:

Ableton Live

Phase Plant

Live Recording using Zoom and AKG microphones

Music:

Sibelius

Noteperformer

Art:

Blender for 3D modeling

Krita UI 2D Art texturing etc.

Character Creator for main character

Unreal Packs used:

Mawi Meadows

First Person Starter Pack

Residential Houses and Props

Adventure Character

Chameleon VFX Post Processing Shader

AI Tools:

Chat-GPT for Monster backstory and Son Paul's Familyportrait

SoundID for changing my voice into Laura and Gorans voices etc.