NORTHWAVE · SOUND ENGINE

Sound is the oldest of the arts. The game is built for it first.

Northwave turns a game's sound design into a request list: every sound the game needs is a named slot with a reason attached. Every sound is made by a person — there is no generated audio here, and there never will be. You record; the tree fills; the kit ships.

The room you are standing in — a few unbroken seconds of it doing nothing
room-tone-interior-01 · recorded by a person, on the microphone they had · becomes loops · the first delivered sound of the first project

A world begins with air.
Before the footsteps, before the doors,
before anyone says a word —
a room, holding its breath.

Everything you will ever hear
happens between two silences.
What passes between them is the whole of it —
the first cry, the work, the requiem.

A game is a small world asking to exist.
To be, in a world, is to be heard.

So we do not generate its voice.
We go where the world is,
hold the microphone still,
and let it speak for itself.

Made by hand, all the way back

The engine

A tree, a table, and a kit

One plain-text table and a clock. Seven verbs. Nothing locks.

TREE

The engine asks. Each branch is a request: what to record, how, and why it matters — where it plays, when, how loud. Green is delivered; red is needed. Right-click a slot and record now.

TABLE

The whole design is one readable table: page, thing, when, level, bank, words. Beds loop at 0.5; acts speak at 1.0. A person can read it; so can an engine.

KIT

A folder a game can read: your table, your recordings, and a small engine. Adapters for Wwise, FMOD, Godot, Unreal, and Unity. Ordinary CSV and WAV — your work is never locked to this app.

Northwave Sound Engine, for macOS.
MAC APP STORE
1.0 in review · free · no account, no cloud, no network