When We Made... Before Your Eyes
Oliver Lewin, game director for GoodbyeWorld Games, tells Vince Pavey about the challenges of creating a video game controlled by blinking, as well as updating it for PSVR2
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Oliver Lewin, game director for GoodbyeWorld Games
efore Your Eyes is a beautiful, tense and occasionally distressing game in which your own real-life blinks
can move forward the passage of time. Its players live through the story of Benny Brynn, as they encounter the people, places and moments that ultimately made up his brief time on Earth.
The game is framed by a conversation with a Ferryman, who explains that what you see will determine whether there is enough of a case for Benny to get into the VIP section of the afterlife or not. … No pressure, then. “It’s a story about the expectations we place upon ourselves and our fears of falling short of them,” explains the game’s director Oliver Lewin, who has been with the project since very early on, and was responsible for a lot of the game’s update posts on Kickstarter throughout its somewhat lengthy development.
52 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023
If you’re unfamiliar, Before Your Eyes started out as Close Your in 2014, a game with a very similar concept and usage of camera tech which was successfully crowdfunded two years later. As its scope, budget and team grew, it went through several iterative changes, and even another to audiences in 2021 as the game we’re more familiar with today. But before all that — where did the core concept come from? “As a college student, Will Hellwarth started
the project and originated the idea for the central mechanic of players’ blinks causing time to move forward,” recalls Lewin. “Seeing facial detection start to become commonplace in mobile apps at the time, I think he realised, ‘Why not use this in a meaningful interactive way?’ “Not just for the novelty, but in a poetic sense, because blinking is linked so harmoniously with time passing – like an
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