For decades, video games have been used to push the boundaries of technology and storytelling. Video games add a level of immersion to a story that movies can’t provide because the player is physically involved and immersed in the world. Developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with gaming, and the GoodbyeWorld Games team is ready to make its mark on the gaming industry with its first title, Before Your Eyes.
Everyone is familiar with the concept of your life flashing before your eyes when you die, but GoodbyeWorld Games takes that concept to the next level and makes it a reality. Before Your Eyes tells the story of a person who has died and is entering the afterlife. Prompted by a mythical ferryman, the player goes back and experiences key moments in the person’s life, from first dates to funerals. The catch? When the player blinks, the scene ends and the moment vanishes. Game Rant sat down with the producer and lead writer, Graham Parkes, and the lead engineer, Richard Beare, to discuss the challenges of developing a new video game technology to tell a uniquely immersive story. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How did you get started on Before Your Eyes and what has the experience been like for you?
Parkes: This game actually started as a senior project. Will, who’s not on this call, who’s the creator and one of the directors on the project it started as his thesis project at USC. We were all high school friends. As soon as he had the idea, he knew that it was going to be a very story-centric game. I was at NYU at the time studying playwriting. Will and I spent our high school years taking the bus together, just talking about games and, you know, pontificating about the future of interactive media and always had that shared passion.
So early on he had this kind of “out there” idea and realized that all commercial computers normally come with a webcam that can do eye-tracking. He had the idea of using that to make a narrative game about life, literally flashing before your eyes. It’s such a potent idea that got me so excited and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to work with them. We built a version of it that is one 10th of what it is now. It was blocky cube graphics and text. It was a very unsophisticated little game, but we submitted it to IndieCade and ended up winning the Developer’s Choice award there. Then we did more work on it, it went to GDC, and won the Student award there.
By that time felt like, oh man, this is just a little fraction of what we’d actually like to do with this thing. I think there was something about the central hook and the way that players reacted to having this story unfold, where every time you blinked would be tracked and you would jump forward in time. You try to stay in these moments, but inevitably you have to blink.
Even with a somewhat unsophisticated story and unsophisticated production, we were getting this real emotional reaction that we were kind of disarmed, by. There’s just something about it that really cuts into people and resonates. After that, we kind of all looked at each other and I’m like, there’s clearly something special here. We wanted to continue to work on it and build a fuller version of it. Rich got involved pretty soon, I think.
Beare: Yeah, exactly. At that time they had the Kickstarter campaign and they had people backing it, and there were funds coming in to pay for a developer. Through mutual contacts, Will reached out to me and said he was looking for someone to help out, particularly with the blink detection algorithm and then beyond as a technical guy, as an implementer. And I was really excited by the project. I was just really thrilled by the concept and the idea and having watched some of those videos from GDC, seeing people react to the experience was really strong.
It really struck me, just seeing their emotions on their faces. They were kind of surprised by their own blinks. I thought, this is really cool and I think we can make this better. When I, when I tested the game out, there was definitely room for improvement. As Graham said, it was a proof of concept level, a very basic implementation. It kind of went from there.
Over the years, the game changed drastically. The actual core mechanics of the game, the look and feel of the game, and the quality of the blink detection were what I spent quite a bit of time on in the early days. Over time as feedback came in, I would make adjustments to accommodate various insights and try to understand the root cause of problems people were having, et cetera, et cetera.
Parkes: Rich has been completely essential for making the blink detection work as advertised. Before Richard came on, it was not something that we could have released as a commercial product. Through Rich’s work as an engineer, he figured out how to build this system in a way that would work for everybody, for lots of different gamers and lots of different computers. It’s been a big journey technically and design-wise, but we’re finally at a place that we feel really good about.
Q: What are the biggest elements of the game that changed as the project evolved?
Parkes: Our game has gone through so many phases. Two years ago we were able to secure an outside partnership with a company called Ryot. They’re under Verizon and they do a lot of VR and documentary stuff, a very cool company. We were able to increase the scale and scope of the project and at that point, we were able to hire more people and really think about what’s working and what’s not.
We hired on Bela Messex (lead designer) who looked at the project with fresh eyes. Before then, every time you blinked, literally every time, you’d jump forward in time. That made writing a story very, very difficult because you would write these scenes and have no idea if someone would just instantly blink through them or live in them for 30 seconds.
It was an amazing thing to do in a 10-15 minute show. But when you thought about actually trying to tell a two-hour-plus story and build something that felt cinematic and full-bodied as a narrative, very quickly it was clear that that wasn’t going to work. So we came up with this thing that we call the blink counter, which is this little metronome at the bottom of the screen. Before that metronome comes up, we started using blinks in all these other cool ways that we weren’t doing before, where it’s not just blinking to jump forward in time, it’s blinking to reveal the environment or engage in a mini-game.
There was so much that we weren’t exploring, and it was this perfect way to divide our scenes up. You see a scene before that counter comes up, but then once it does the player knows, “Oh, the next time I blink, I’m going to be jumping forward.” It created this pace that we didn’t have before and we were able to kind of design and write in a completely new way.
Q: Is there a cutoff for the scenes where you thought, surely no one will go this long without blinking?
Parkes: That’s a great question. If you’re cheating the game, the scenes will run out eventually. The dialogue will run out and there will not be anything more to do. So it naturally cuts itself off, but we try to write it long. You can also play the game using clicks to simulate blinking if you just want to experience the story and not experience that side of it. But if you’re keeping your eyes open, there’s probably something more to see or do. We always wanted to bake in that sense of regret of, “I might be missing something. I want to keep my eyes open, but I can’t.” We’ve really tried to hold onto that through every iteration of the game because it’s the core emotion for us.
Q: How did you decide on the specific moments and memories to explore? Was it more personal, or did you try to choose moments that everybody could relate to?
Parkes: Finding the universal through the personal is always what I think ends up working. It started with us sharing old memories. A lot of the core people here are old friends. We all grew up together in the same neighborhood, so we have a lot of shared memories. And so it was a lot about picking into our memories of growing up. We digitized home movies and we started to build a story that did still feel universal but had those points of personal contact for us. Once we started doing that, the story took on a new texture and a life of its own. It’s not an autobiographical story in any way, but it definitely has been pulled from all of our lives in one way or another.
Q: What was the most challenging thing you encountered in the development process?
Beare: On the technical side, blink detection was by far the most challenging thing. It was when I first got in the project. We put a lot of emphasis on the blink on improving the blink algorithm, but the challenge early on was getting it to work for every shape of face, you know, people wearing glasses, different lighting conditions, camera placement, and all that kind of stuff. There were a lot of variables to account for, and in the early days, we managed to make a lot of progress in making it work very well for this limited set of individuals, which was me and the team.
And then as time progressed, people would come back with feedback. Some would say, “You know, the blink doesn’t work that great for me.” But other people would say, “Oh, it worked so well!” We had to reconcile the root causes of that. So that was always an ongoing challenge, but it always got better.
Then I think some of those design considerations were a challenge, like how do you make a game that relies solely on blinking, or at least for the most part, and make these interactions feel organic and enjoyable? How do we game-ify this and make the player feel a sense of agency?
With the blinking, you only have a limited amount of control. Blinking is involuntary unless you’re really focused. And like there’s an interaction in the game where you get to play the piano, so we went through iterations on that to figure out, how do we make this feel good? We had mini-games we experimented with, and we were thinking, how do we tie the mini-games into this story?
Parkes: Yeah. Bela had a realization at one point that there was an additional challenge for us because blinking really isn’t a mechanic, it’s actually an input more like a controller. We had to realize like, we’re designing a controller, and then we’re designing a game to be played with that controller. And that’s an extra level of design that you might not have to think about in-game that has more traditional inputs.
We found that we had to work on basic core levels, asking how do we make the simple act of interacting on something feel good? We know how to make a button press field good, but how do we make a blink feel good? It was like going back to these various central design building blocks, which was part of the fun of doing it.
Beare: If you think about how Apple released the iPhone in 2006, they were like, “Hey, we’ve got this new interface called a touch screen.” Touch screens have been around, but they were really revolutionized. I love the analogy that Graham uses, how it’s like a controller.
Q: Do you envision more games utilizing the same kind of technology? What’s the future of it?
Parkes: We are very interested in continuing to push the bounds of how we interact with our games. One of our favorite things about this game is that we always said that needs to pass the “mom test.” If you put it in front of a mom or someone who’s not a traditional gamer, they should be able to play it just as well as somebody who’s logged hundreds of hours into Skyrim. It lowers the playing field and brings people into games who maybe don’t normally play games, and it creates totally new experiences that I feel could be explored more.
We hope to keep exploring. It might not be blinking. Rich has actually been building some very interesting prototypes for different things, so we’re definitely interested in continuing to explore in this space. There’s a section in the game where you don’t just have to blink, you actually have to hold your eyes closed and the camera knows if you’re holding your eyes closed. That was something we came too late that we really fell in love with because it’s such an immersive feeling to actually have to have your eyes closed.
That mechanic we discovered too late, and I think it works great here, but we’ve started to talk about, “Oh, could we spin that out and do more with that?” So I don’t know if we’re going to be doing another blink game, but we are interested in continuing to explore this kind of non-traditional controller space, and Rich, I’ll let you speak to it.
Beare: Yeah, I concur. There’s a lot of opportunities and actually speaking of the blink detection algorithm, the underlying technology is not proprietary. There are various technologies that are available that you can purchase and they track the points in your face, but we’re using that data to do something novel, which is blink detection. People in the world may have done this already, but we haven’t seen it done in games. So we wrote our own way of detecting blinks and adapting to various spaces and such. So that part is proprietary.
And that face tracking tool, the neat part is it, it, it also tracks your mouth and your nose. You’ve seen Snapchat filters, which use a similar type of technology. That could be extended to facial features and expressions. AI is another technology that’s available that could potentially do be used to determine the emotion on people’s faces. How are they feeling? How are they responding to this input? If someone’s shocked, maybe the game reacts or something. All that, all of that is stuff that we’re excited to explore in the future.
Q: What do you want to be the main takeaway of this game?
Parkes: Early on we wanted this to be a game about processing mortality. The essential thing in the game is experiencing these scenes, then the blink counter comes up, and like it or not, you’re inevitably going to have to blink. And it’s interesting watching people play because there are some players that go in, and that really frustrates them. Then there are some players who come in and take it easier, but like time and like death, it is inevitable. It’s going to happen no matter what.
At the end of the day, we wanted this to be a game about fighting that and then ultimately learning to accept. You’re learning to realize that you can’t fight time, you can’t fight death, but you can try to learn to be present and be in the moment.
We’ve crafted a narrative that takes place after a person’s death, set in a mythical realm where these ferrymen pull up mysterious souls from the sea of souls, and they don’t know who these souls are. They have to ask the soul questions about their life so that they can take the soul to this mythical gatekeeper figure and make a case for why the soul is worthy of entering into this land of the dead.
The story is really about an essential misunderstanding where this character thinks that in order to be worthy, he has to prove that he’s great in the way that we, you know, in our day-to-day lives. We get so caught up in what we’re doing with our careers, we write-ups about us, or want to show off at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
The character makes the mistake that in reality, what actually matters in terms of making the soul worthy is how good you were to the people around you, how much you were able to be present, and those sorts of things. So it is very much a little parable, which is really about bringing you back into the present. Hopefully, it makes you grateful for the present and a little less anxious about who you’re going to become or trying to fight against the future. That’s what the story is about.
Before Your Eyes will be available for PC on April 8.
