Before Your Eyes developer interview: Sibling studio dreams big with spiritual successor

Creating an award-winning video game, while no small feat, does place a certain amount of pressure on you to continue developing equally impressive experiences. In turn, success becomes a double-edged sword. Or rather, it can do if your primary focus is on winning again instead of creating something true to your creative vision.

For the developers behind Before Your Eyes, they knew that expectation would rear its head once they started making their second game. Perhaps even more so due to them creating a new studio with which to make Goodnight Universe happen.

Much like their first game, Goodnight Universe utilises unique gameplay mechanics to create a narrative that you’re in control of through more than just your actions. By using “face tracking”, your face becomes the controller. It brings with it a new way to explore the world around you, arguably one that’s apt for a story told through the eyes of a six-month-old child.

A whimsical world of wonder is awaiting in Goodnight Universe. Check out its teaser trailer below

I wanted to find out more about this new chapter for the developers, but also about Goodnight Universe itself. Despite being busy fine-tuning their new game, Nice Dream’s studio director and producer, Ollie Lewin, took the time to chat with me.

What I initially found most intriguing, even more so considering the studio won an award for what they created, was the reasoning behind forming their own studio. After all, while they’re a bunch of talented individuals, it’s still not an easy career move to make.

“GoodbyeWorld Games was envisioned as a gamemaker collective, formed by our longtime friend and collaborator Will Hellwarth. He started it in college around the same time that he created the core concept for Before Your Eyes, and began assembling the initial team for that game,” Lewin explained.

“Once we released Before Your Eyes, we wanted to start an offshoot studio specifically focused on narrative games like it, and based around most of the core team from that project. So that’s what led to Nice Dream. We call it a sibling studio.”

Rather than being a sudden departure, the creation of Nice Dream seems to have been a logical conclusion to the experience shared while developing Before Your Eyes. In knowing this, it made me wonder if the foundations for its spiritual successor – Goodnight Universe – had taken shape in the minds of the team before they created Nice Dream.

However, according to Lewin, it took them a while to discover the story for Goodnight Universe. “No, it took a while to reach that point. Throughout making Before Your Eyes, we’d have ideas for mechanics that didn’t fit into it. Many of those fell into the realm of psychic powers, and after the game was done, we started exploring that world and making prototypes.”

They continued, “Through that pursuit of psychic stuff, Graham Parkes (Nice Dream’s co-founder, creative director, and lead writer) then found the narrative concept for Goodnight Universe, and that’s how we reached the game we wanted to make.”

Yet, while they’d discovered the gameplay foundation for their next title, there were still puzzle pieces missing before the final picture formed clearly in their minds. Lewin shared, “There were two main pieces to the puzzle, one being the psychic element, and the other, which clicked into place later, was the baby element. It was a bit of a 'right under our noses' thing, because our lead designer and programmer Bela Messex had just recently had his first baby, so I think this environmental osmosis was occurring as we looked for the core of what the game was.”

The main protagonist being a child, and a young one at that, is quite the bold creative decision to make, especially when tackling hard-hitting themes like grief, loss, etc. Goodnight Universe is by no means the first game to use a child as its lead character, but in going down this route, their youth certainly makes for a potentially raw, emotive experience. This led me to question why grief has become such a focal point in game narratives in recent years.

“Well, I think because those things can be so hard to talk about, stories give us a good opportunity to engage with them,” Lewin posited, “Sometimes you go years without figuring something out, but a story comes along and spurs on a moment of clarity. There are artworks you turn to to distract from something complex in life, and there are those that help you parse through it. We really love the stories that do so without sacrificing levity or humour.”

These are multifaceted emotions being played out through Before Your Eyes, and soon to via the conduit of Goodnight Universe, and thus we need an equally complex way to explore them. The word “nuanced” gets overused, however, in this instance, it's the perfect way to summarise the intricacies of the subject matter.

"I think a lot of us on the team are just excited to make things that prioritise theme and reflection. We’ve gotten a lot of messages from players telling us how Before Your Eyes helped them through something tough, and those are special to us. They keep us motivated.”

“In Goodnight Universe, one of the things we examine is the feeling of not quite fitting into your own family. I think that’s something a lot of people might find familiar, and we’re excited to hear how people relate to it,” Lewin added.

For the time being, Nice Dream is focused on Goodnight Universe and its “outlandish world”. This isn’t to say that the wonderful team won’t cook up another thought-provoking and unusual premise for a game; after all, Lewin revealed to me that the team are already considering ideas for future projects. That said, the only story important to them right now is Goodnight Universe's.