The piano also served as a great way of acknowledging the passing of time, going from a little toy piano at the beginning of the game to playing Bach half an hour - or ten years - later. He explains that although there were a lot of ideas floated for minigames, the piano rose to the top because of how credibly it could be implemented thanks to the external expertise of individual team members. Lewin, the game director, also served as co-composer on Before Your Eyes with Dillon Terry. One of the concepts that didn’t get thrown out was the piano, a recurring motif throughout the game that informs a significant amount of its most tender and intense moments. That was frustrating at first, but ended up being really fascinating.” I had to throw so much stuff out the window to accommodate those little moments and make them work. “I really had to bend the way I was thinking to work with these moments and make sure that the story was speaking and the player didn't feel frustrated. “But you wouldn't have each of those scenes being so special because they required so much TLC to get to that point. “There's a world where this game could be much longer,” Messex adds. I don't know why, maybe that's weird of us to put that stuff in there, but there's a lot of good stuff that if you can stay in these scenes you'll hear, and if you don't, maybe that's a reason to play it again.” And I think there's probably some things in there that you literally cannot catch. “I personally find that exciting - you can't catch everything. “There are some lines in the game that very few people are going to catch and they were designed that way,” Lewin explains. Interestingly, these ideas are also compounded with mythology, although I won’t get too much into that here - again, you’ll need to play it to find out. For example, Lewin took photographs of every corner of his childhood home, while visual signifiers of growing up in California like agave and coyotes regularly appear throughout the game. This thematic basis - feelings and processes like acceptance, loss, and reflection - was informed by the team’s own personal experiences. That's what we liked about the idea of focusing on blinking - it's about missing things.”
We knew that it was going to be about these themes of acceptance, loss, and reflection. “It pulls you into the story and makes you a little bit more attentive to things. “It's a little hard to describe, but something about using your face and focusing on your micro movements has this intimate feeling,” Lewin adds. “So we had to go back and look at how the blink was being used and really use it for these special moments where you're revealing something in the scene.” “When we started working with Skybound they actually said there was too much blinking and we needed to tone it down,” Messex tells me.
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.