We’re opening our week-long celebration of indie developers by looking at Blink, an innovative new game from the four-person Blue Void Studios. The game’s currently in an alpha stage of development, with a single trailer available to look at, but the team are doing their best to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to sustain the game through the development process. They’ve already accumulated $6,487 in pledges, which they’ll receive in cash on only one condition: a total of at least $10,000 is pledged by November 28th. If they don’t meet their goal, Blink might not get made at all.

“It’s a little scary, because we have ten days left and we’re at 61% funding,” Nick Pfisterer tells me during our interview last week. I spoke to Nick and his colleague Jessica Lang, who together make up the design side of Blue Void Studios. “We’re doing good - not great, but not bad - and we still have a couple of things left that we want to give to the community and show off before it’s over, so we’re hoping that’ll help generate some more buzz. We want to create a new gameplay video next week, hopefully dive a little deeper in the actual core mechanics of the game.”



Blink’s core gameplay mechanic visualised

So what exactly is Blink? I let Nick describe the game in his own words. “I would describe Blink as a first-person puzzle game that’s got platforming elements,” he begins. “The big driving force behind it is conveying the feeling that you’re in a dream, so surrealism has been a big theme aesthetically, and with level design and music as well.” The game was originally conceived at a forty-eight hour game jam in January, with the theme of “extinction”. Developers attending the event were challenged to make a working game based on the theme within forty-eight hours, and Nick, Jessica, an individual named Doc Preuss, and one of their programmers, Russell, worked together to make something unique. Preuss didn’t go own to work with Blue Void Studios, but the team picked up another coder, Parish Regn-Stillwaggon, to bring the concept into a full-scale game.

“Visual extinction” is a neurological condition caused by a lesion on the brain which basically causes the sufferer to be unable to interpret two stimuli at the same time. For example, when confronted by two objects, they’ll only notice one of them, not the other; when the two objects are presented separately, however, the sufferer can correctly interpret and identify them. That condition was extended into the basic gameplay mechanic of Blink: the concept that you can’t see everything at once. Players switch between two versions of the world, but unlike real-life “visual extinction”, what players cannot see really isn’t there. In one version of the world, you might see a platform on which you can stand, but in the other is a gaping crevice leading to your death.

The concept itself is interesting, but the team are dedicated to making its execution a special experience, too. Blink will support the Hydra out of the box, a motion controller for PC that allows for precise motion detection. It’s manufactured by Razer, a leading peripheral and accessory producer, and conceived by Sixense Entertainment, and it’s already been praise by the likes of Valve, who included a set of levels in Portal 2 exclusively for Hydra owners, specially designed to work well with the motion controls. Blink will play perfectly well with keyboard and mouse - Jessica and Nick know that most players won’t have the Hydra - but it’ll also fully support the motion controller, and encourage its use to enjoy the game to its fullest.”We met Sixense, the guys who developed the technology, back at GDC 2010, and we’ve been kind of going back and forth with them ever since,” Nick explains. “We got an early dev kit, originally because we were working on something a bit more ambitious, which is basically on hold until we can finish Blink […] as far as the Hydra goes, we saw the technology and were really excited for it. A, it was bringing motion control to the PC gamers; and B, it was doing so in a really serious way. The technology was really incredible, it’s really accurate. It doesn’t use gyroscopes or anything, which is pretty cool, and there’s a lot of freedom with it.”

Using the Hydra with the Unreal Development Kit is where things get a little bit more complicated. While the prototype of Blink developed at the game jam also used the Hydra, and met positive reactions from other attendees, it was built with Unity and then the controls were not directly coded into the game, but added through the use of the Hydra configurator software. The team chose to switch back to UDK when they decided to build a whole game out of the idea, because it was the engine with which they collectively have the most experience - but UDK doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for the Hydra controller either.

“We had to integrate it with UDK, so that’s been part of our journey as well, coming up with an integration solution to let us use the Hydra with Unreal games, and because we’re doing that, you won’t have to use the Hydra configurator when it comes out. If you have a Hydra, you’ll just have to plug it in and go, and the game will know.”

“We want to make sure that both keyboard and mouse and the Hydra are equally fun,” reminds Nick. “I want to think of the Hydra as maybe the ‘premium’ experience. If you have a Hydra, then you’ll get to experience it in a different way, but not necessarily a better way. We know keyboard and mouse is going to be the core audience by far, there’s no arguing that, so there’s no reason for us to abandon them in favour of cool technology.”



“The Third & The Seventh”

The game’s surrealist aesthetic has been frequently compared to Portal, says Nick, although that’s a far cry from what they want to achieve. There aren’t any technology or sci-fi aspects to the game - they’re citing the DLC time trials from Mirror’s Edge and a short film called “The Third & The Seventh” by Alex Roman as the real influences. Of the latter, Nick says: “it’s really fascinating. It’s basically the guy made it all in 3D Studio MAX, so it’s all in 3D, sans a few things he composited in, but it’s really fascinating. It’s a 12 minute short film he made, and it’s supposed to be his sort of testament to photography and architecture, his two big passions in life, but all the environments he built were just so incredible.”

“Everything was built out of familiar materials, but in unfamiliar ways, like lots of buildings constructed from really heavy marble, and really huge libraries, and big concrete buildings that were sterile and lifeless but still beautiful to look at. So I guess we’re going for an aesthetic between [that and Mirror’s Edge], and so far it’s mainly using stone, marble, materials like that, that you’d think of when you’re thinking about museums and old buildings, just that old architecture feel. That’s the aesthetic that we’re going for, more so than a sci-fi look.”

The team are aiming to release a “feature-complete version” of the game by GDC 2012, barring any delays, and presuming they achieve their Kickstarter goal. “The platforms we’re aiming for are Steam, Desura, and hopefully the Mac App Store as well,” says Nick, and they’ll be bringing full Steamworks integration as well, even offering to name achievements after people who pledge a certain amount of money on the Kickstarter page. You can keep an eye on Blink’s development on Blue Void Studios’ website here, or make a much-needed pledge on the Kickstarter page itself here. Don’t forget to check out the zConnection Indie Week page here, where you can see what’s coming up this week, and track our official Twitter hashtag, #zcindieweek.