Blink: A surreal first-person gaming experience

[Crieve]

Originally Found At: Blink (On Kickstarter.com)

Blink is an FPP (First Person Puzzle) being created by a couple of my college buddies. They're trying to get out of using their part-time jobs for funding, so this may be the way they do so. Anyways, here's a bit about the project they're working on:



Basically, you control what you can interact with in the environment by clicking a mouse button.

Blink is a first-person game crafted with an innovative formula of platforming, puzzles, and mystery. In a surreal world that is both beautiful and lifeless, you find you are somehow able to freely slip between two unique perceptions of the world. Will you come to grips with this strange power, or will you lose your grip on reality?

Narrative without dialogue. The game does have a plot. But rather than use dialogue to guide the player, we chose to use visual and auditory cues. There will be no cinematics or "cut scenes" either. Everything is presented to the player through experience. This way, the player can still be deeply immersed without ever having control taken from them.

Thought-provoking gameplay. It all started in January 2011 at the Global Game Jam, an annual competition where game developers from around the world challenge themselves to create a game in 48-hours based on a given theme. This year the theme was "extinction." It didn't take long for us to realize we didn't want to go the traditional route of apocalyptic scenarios or sci-fi epics about genetic manipulation. We discovered a unique and, frankly, very compelling neurological disorder known as visual extinction. From Wikipedia:

"Visual extinction has the characteristic symptom of difficulty to perceive contralesional stimuli when presented simultaneously with an ipsilesional stimulus, but the ability to correctly identify them when not presented simultaneously. Under simultaneous presentation, the contralesional stimulus is apparently ignored by the patient, or extinguished."

OK, now in English. When a visual extinction patient is presented with two different objects at the same time, the patient may ignore one of them. On the contrary, the patient usually has no problem correctly identifying both objects if presented separately. It was this fascinating concept that gave birth to the core gameplay of Blink.

The player has the ability to slip between two different perceptions of the world at will. Left-clicking the mouse shows one, while right-clicking the mouse shows the other. The key to utilizing this ability is understanding that what you see is what you get.


Poetry in motion (control). Thanks to the amazing team at Sixense Entertainment in collaboration with PC gaming peripheral innovators Razer, 1:1 motion control is now in the hands of PC gamers. They've worked hard to support plenty of existing games that people know and love -- but what about new games? We're proud to announce that Blink will support the Razer Hydra motion controller out of the box, adding a whole new layer of immersion to the game.

We create our games with Unreal Development Kit, the same toolset used to create Gears of War and Infinity Blade. The Hydra doesn't work with UDK out of the box though, so we had to create an integrated solution that allows the Hydra and UDK to talk to each other. It's been a long time coming, but with Blink that integration will finally come to light. Blink will be one of the first games since the popular Portal 2 to offer native support for the Hydra motion controller. We are thrilled to be involved with such innovative technology, but we certainly don't want to hog the spotlight. That's why we are making our Hydra-to-UDK solution available to all Unreal developers in the near future.

We've had the Hydra in mind since the early design stages, trying to pinpoint the most exciting opportunities for interacting with Blink in unique yet intuitive ways. We don't want the motion control to feel like a gimmick, but we don't want to abandon traditional keyboard-and-mouse input either. Rest assured that designing a strong experience for the Hydra will not detract from the keyboard-and-mouse option. We're doing everything we can do ensure both are equally fun to play with.

Honestly, it looks like it'll be pretty cool if it ever gets published.