building things that behave like they're alive —
or like they were once.
you look down. something looks back. the rope gets shorter.
itch.iothe mirror is always one frame behind. until it isn't.
itch.ioaudio-first horror. your voice comes back wrong.
itch.ioa game about damage that doesn't show where you expect it.
itch.ioclose the tabs. don't open the wrong one. work is almost done.
itch.iothe frame repeats. you're the only one who notices.
Conceptbiometric horror. something is measuring you back.
Concepta social feed that slowly becomes yours alone.
Conceptthalassophobia in negative space and low-frequency dread.
Concepta door that opens once. the game begins the second time.
Conceptevery project starts as a proof of concept.
most of them refuse to stay that way.
Sade Black (they/them) is a multidisciplinary creative technologist working independently. the practice spans music production, audio tool development, horror game design, and experimental web development.
operating under the handle SVDE and svdeblk. based in California.
recurring obsessions: Web Audio API as DSP layer. single-file portable HTML artifacts as a build philosophy. procedural generation. horror as a design system. glitch and corruption as interactive mechanics.
the work doesn't separate aesthetics from engineering — the feeling of a thing is part of its specification.
Tools & Technologies
players are trapped in a liminal broadcast station. the signal is degrading. something is in the static. they must reconstruct the original broadcast before the chapel fully manifests around them. mechanics: frequency tuning, signal overlap, cooperative decryption.
one or more players are already infected. the infection spreads through actions, not information. you don't know you're infected until the spore count tips. body horror as social deduction. the infected don't play differently — they just optimize for the wrong thing.
a tabletop RPG session that begins normally and ends wrong. players receive session notes, character sheets, and a premise. the GM role rotates. halfway through, something in the fiction starts bleeding. a game about the membrane between the table and the story.
one player is the signal. the others are listeners. the signal player communicates only through a constrained channel — symbols, sounds, patterns — and the listeners must decode the message before the frequency dies. the signal doesn't know it's dying.
a survival game set in a forest that knows you're in it. the map shifts. landmarks remember being visited. players must navigate using accumulated trail knowledge, not a fixed board. the forest isn't hostile — it's curious. the horror is being something it hasn't seen before.
things that exist in the idea space. named, partially specced, not shipped. may become real.
build diary. timestamped. no neat summaries.
got the peripheral detection working. the entity now correctly registers as "seen" when the camera's forward vector comes within 18° of its position. the ever_looked boolean flips and stays flipped. tested the third ending — the one where you never look — and the room feels completely different when you're maintaining it intentionally vs accidentally. that's the game.
shipped post threading to v0.2 staging. the substrate/matter vocabulary is holding up better than expected. a thread feels different from a reply feels different from a standalone post in ways i didn't fully spec. the federation model is making me think about what "conversation" means when there's no algorithm deciding what you see.
AUTOPSY mode is partially working. the internal state of a dying sequence is now externalizable as a canvas visualization. watching gravelang sequences decay in real time is exactly as uncomfortable as intended. each mode (NECROMANCY / DECAY / ENTROPY) now has a distinct failure texture. ENTROPY feels the most honest.
revised the partial lifespan countdown spec. originally each partial had a fixed timer. now they age at different rates based on frequency register — high partials die faster, low ones persist. this was not planned. it emerged from testing and immediately sounded more right. the math is in the notes. the feeling is: inevitable.
spent three hours migrating the idea inventory. 297+ concepts now in the notion DB with proper relational structure. the ideas that seemed half-formed when i wrote them are actually more complete than i thought. the ones i thought were solid are stranger than i remembered. the catalog is its own kind of artifact.
finished the full design doc for THE UNDERWOOD. the mechanic where the forest "remembers" visited landmarks required a second tile layer i hadn't planned for. it works now. playtested solo — the game correctly made me feel observed. not threatened. just. watched.
you have wandered somewhere that does not exist. the hallway continues but the doors have stopped.
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