How Before Your Eyes went from student project to BAFTA award-winner

destructoid.com:

It was during IndieCade 2014 that the team behind indie hit Before Your Eyes knew they had something. They were showing a student project, titled Close Your at the time. And even in its earliest state, it was emotionally resonating with people who played it.

“People were crying, you know, after sitting down with it for 15 minutes,” remembers Graham Parkes, creative director and lead writer at GoodbyeWorld Games. 

The group had brought a student project to show off, next to up-and-coming experiences like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. They didn’t know at the time that it would kick off a seven-year journey, eventually leading to a published release under Skybound and a BAFTA.

Will Hellwarth, Oliver Lewin, and Graham Parkes all knew each other growing up. The old high school buddies met at a young age before splintering off to different places for higher education. Parkes went to NYU to study playwriting; Lewin studied music at the New School; and Hellwarth went to USC, to study game design.

It started with Hellwarth figuring out how webcams could utilize eye-tracking. Leveraging a demo from Mixamo, an animation company in San Francisco, Hellwarth used it to read and react to the movement of someone’s eyes via the built-in webcam.

Around the same time in the indie scene, Brendon Chung and Blendo Games had been making waves with Thirty Flights of Loving. Its use of cuts, a film-making concept transposed into video games, would soon collide with the webcam tech, as Hellwarth conceived the basic concept for Close Your. Parkes says they started to pick up on this tension of holding onto memories as you blink through them. 

“And so we very quickly got to this idea of life flashing before your eyes,” Parkes says. “Let’s do a