6/14/2023 0 Comments Game where scene changes blinkkWithout spoiling anything, this is used to excellent effect in an astonishing number of unexpected ways - you’ll have to play it for yourself to see though, eh? After all, the theme of Before Your Eyes is “if you blink, you’ll miss,” which is something that literally happens over and over again as you progress through the narrative. This was one of the team’s biggest fears, and so they consciously ensured that each and every blink was thoughtfully considered in relation to both the overarching story and ongoing rhythm of the game. Even after balancing the blink to suit myriad variables, it still needed to matter - it needed to be more than a click. This obviously wasn’t the only issue with a game as ambitious as Before Your Eyes. At a certain point, you realize there's a way to get this across while not being as frustrating, so it's trying to dial that frustration meter. “And we'd be like, well, that's the whole point - acceptance and the inevitability of time moving forward. “You hear from testers, ‘Oh, I love the game, but it was just super frustrating, and I kept on blinking out of scenes and I wanted to hear more,'” he explains. ![]() While it’s important to give people the ability to control their blinks to at least some extent, the frustration of missing a scene because you blinked prematurely is part of the experience. Lewin builds on this, explaining that there’s a delicate balance here. You can actually stay in scenes for a long time if you time your blinks correctly - as Messex says, “I guess that would be like min/maxing our game.” Messex went on to add a metronome to the bottom of the screen, affording you more control and allowing you to rest your eyes between progression prompts, while interactable environmental objects provided room to refresh your eyes before moving on. At this point it had already won a handful of awards, but the blink was different in that it was instant - you could essentially speedrun the game just by keeping your eyes closed. Messex joined the team two years ago to tackle Before Your Eyes’ programming and design. It didn’t take long for them to make the connection to blinking, an inevitable player input that has inherent links to timing while simultaneously operating as a springboard for gameplay and a metaphorical and thematic driver for narrative. While developing the core idea of the game, the team started to wonder why webcams - despite their ubiquity - weren’t being explored as an input for interaction. Lewin explains that the premise of Before Your Eyes has its origins in a college project from way back in 2014. Related: Before Your Eyes Is A New Interactive Afterlife You Play By Blinking As opposed to clicking your way through each scene as you might do in a more conventional game, progression is almost entirely mapped to blinking.Īfter playing through Before Your Eyes, I got the chance to sit down with game director Oliver Lewin and lead programmer Bela Messex in order to discuss how the team invented, iterated on, and ultimately implemented the functions necessary for creating such a unique experience in the first place. ![]() Before Your Eyes is an experience unlike any other.
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