What he’s looking for isn’t what your character has done or achieved, he’s looking for the quality of your character and how much you were able to be in the present and be good to people and enjoy life.” “In our world we’re so focused on achievement and greatness in terms of proving yourself with a great career or becoming a great artist or an inventor or businessperson and becoming really rich in the afterlife, in an allegorical sense, none of that stuff really matters. “The essential tension that we came in on that was really interesting to us was like, what is greatness in our world, versus what is greatness in his world?” says Parkes. The player has to make their case about why they’re worthy of that journey, which involves telling him who you were in life - that’s where the idea of “life flashing before your eyes” comes in. The story sees him fishing souls out of the water, which then must be taken to a gatekeeper figure and a city of the dead.
That led to the ferryman in the game taking the form of a canine, and a death spirit, in a way. On the subject of literal death, Parkes says that the team would discuss their early experiences of loss, such as an animal or pet being taken by a coyote in Southern California. People were crying in the booth sitting and playing it.” In that moment, the team knew they had something in the mechanic that was working.
“That metaphor felt so potent to us, and as soon as we built that early version of it and got it in front of people, we were shocked by how much - even though the art and the story were one fraction of what they are now, they really were unsophisticated, but - it still was really making people emotional. “You can try to keep your eyes open, but you’re inevitably going to have to blink,” Parkes emphasizes. “There’s something about that experience that’s kind of so disarming,” he says.Ī metaphor with death is brought up that no matter what, time is going to keep pushing forward no matter how hard one fights. Conversations amongst the team involved the fact that games are often about empowering the player, who then has to master something using a skill or ability - in this game, there is the reality that a player can try not to blink, but they’re going to have to eventually. “I think that there was something in that initial pitch, for all of us, of actually simulating life flashing before your eyes,” says Parkes. Parkes was studying playwriting at NYU when Hellwarth recruited him for the project, knowing that the story was going to be a critical element of the game. “On that side of learning how players engage with the game, there’s also the technical feat of creating a detection algorithm that really is adapted in response to all the varieties of environmental issues that come up with a webcam.” “We had to build a lot of stuff from the ground up.” Along the way, Lewin explains that a goal of the tests were to see how players would automatically use their eyes and how they felt about it. “We had this really strong belief in the joy and the excitement of using blinking and eye detection for interaction in a game, but it was a very new thing,” he says. “When you talk to someone, body language is maybe more important or as important as spoken language and our computers are just becoming capable of using that.”Īs far as using the blinking of an eye to advance the story, Lewin points to a lot of testing. “For me, it’s mostly about trying to push games forward as a medium and saying, ‘look, game designers, we all have access to faces and eyes and mouths and eyes and expressions, all the time now, let’s start using that as part of our games,’ ” says Hellwarth. In Before Your Eyes, players are guided by a ferryman who shepherds souls to the afterlife. “We were always trying to tell a really ambitious story that was the scope of a human lifespan - to experience life flashing before your eyes,” continues Hellwarth.
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