How can a game be scary if the protagonist can’t even see? Such is the on-paper quagmire facing Perception

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Naturally, the designers behind the game have a solution: echolocation – think of a sort of bat-like sonar, triggered when Cassie taps her white stick on the floor – allows our heroine to “see” the creepy house. She’ll be transported through multiple time periods within the house, being freaked out along the way by creepy sounds, quick flashes of spooky things like spiders and ghouls, and the even creepier Poppet dolls that roam the house.But how do you use Cassie’s handicap in order to make a horror game? And do you start by researching the handicap first? The Deep End crew answered them both in one fell swoop.First, Perception creative director and former BioShock Infinite lead designer Bill Gardner had a thorough answer: “I spent my final semester of my Master’s degree studying blindness and the different tools available,” he said. “I spent days with my phone set to accessibility mode, where it turns everything to text-to-speech. I also did things like doing many daily tasks with my eyes closed. Things like walk around a mall to make purchases, use ATMs, etc. It was very challenging, but I feel it was something that I needed to do in order to get Cassie right.“I interviewed many blind people, spoke to a number of accessibility experts, and tried to learn as much as I could. It’s an ongoing process, but it’s been fascinating. For every answer, there are ten more questions. You don’t know how little you know until you start to try to understand something.”Amanda Gardner, a novelist who is a writer and producer on Perception (and, yes, they are related; Bill and Amanda are married), explained how the research led to the fear that was applied to the game design: “There is such an inherent fear in being unable to see,” she said. “When Bill and I researched, I often put on a blindfold and tried to do small tasks. I found myself afraid of everything. One wrong step and I could twist my ankle. If I reached my arm out too far I could jam my hand into the wall. Simply getting around was full of peril, even though Bill was right next to me. Now, Cassie isn’t afraid of her environment, in fact, she’s quite confident, but we wanted the player to feel the discomfort for her in a way.”Why echolocation as the way to have Cassie “see”? “We certainly looked into a variety of ways to represent echolocation, but the core was always there,” Bill Gardner said. “We tried to show this effect in a few ways before we settled on the one we used,” Amanda Gardner clarified. “Sometimes we would watch slow-motion videos of what the air around an object does when it’s in motion. That effect looked a bit too much like fire sometimes. Then we found videos of Schlieren physics and those were probably the closest inspiration to the effect. There’s a sort of fluidity and wind-like appearance we liked.”Of course, realism and fun-factor had to be balanced in order to make the best, scariest game possible. “My goal has always been to try to create the feeling of being a blind person who uses echolocation,” Bill said. “Now, it’s a game, and of every media, games are perhaps the driven the most by visuals. As such, I take liberties for the sake of the game. Early on in development, your echolocation revealed a lot less detail in the world. As we put it in front of players, they rejected it. Many found it too frustrating. So we scaled it back and began to show more detail.“It will continue to be an iterative process throughout development, but Perception was never meant to be a simulation. We have to make something that people really want to play. In that sense, I think we have a very strong balance that both captures some of the feel of what it might be like to use echolocation while still remaining 'fun.'”Amanda elaborated: “We knew echolocation was a real possibility for some blind people. We did a lot of research into individuals who used this technique, but had no real way of showing exactly what it was like, so we came up with a visual way to explain our interpretation of it. It’s artistic license, but we do take the topic of blindness seriously and do not treat it as a gimmick or imply that being blind in itself is ‘fun’ or that echolocation is a neat parlor trick. It’s simply a method some blind people are able to tap into.“As for the fun in the game, it’s not about the blindness, but it’s more about the universal fear of the unknown. Fear is a nuance of fun, and fear of the dark goes hand in hand with that thrill. Why is it that every generation of kids knows to go into a dark bathroom and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times? It’s because fumbling around in the dark is daring. Every step may be one too far. You don’t know what’s in front of you.”Finally, since The Deep End developers all work remotely – that is, they don’t all sit together in an office – I had to ask: do team members slip in creepy little touches or effects without telling each other?“At one point, I was playing with [Perception artist] Desiree [Fernandes], who is terrified of horror games. Out of nowhere, The Presence, who was NOT IN THE LEVEL, surprised us and killed me. She screamed at the top of her lungs. It took her a few minutes to settle. I am not making this up. I think there may be a combination of bugs with how The Presence is spawned or that we happen to catch it at weird times where someone is tweaking something. But every time I ask the team, no one has any answers. It’s made for a very interesting development – one where you can’t let your guard down. True story.”

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.