Perhaps you have, or perhaps you haven’t heard of BlindSide: The Audio Adventure Video Game. If you have yet to, head over to the successfully funded, still open Kickstarter page to read a bit about the project and watch the video pitch. It caught my eye originally because of the concept’s unique nature–a game to be experienced identically by sighted and visually impaired players alike–but what caught both eyes was the fact that my good acquaintance Aaron Rasmussen was part of the tandem (along with Michael T. Astolfi) developing the no graphics episodic title.

Well I just had to talk to him about it, and lucky for us he was nice enough to respond in full to my laundry list of questions regarding the game. In the following interview we discuss the upcoming title’s survival horror elements, the challenges of developing a world that can’t be seen by its players, and overall sources of inspiration. Including Aaron’s own personal brush with blindness.

DIYGamer: First off, congrats are in order. Blindside’s Kickstarter goal has been reached, and surpassed already by thousands of dollars with still a full three weeks left. People certainly seem taken with the concept. Your thoughts on it all?

Aaron Rasmussen: Our thoughts are “thank you so much” to all those people! It’s great to see that other people are as excited about this project as we are. It’s always fun to do something you’re passionate about and to find out that other people appreciate it as well.

DIYGamer: So now that you guys are funded, what’s the next few months of the schedule look like? Are there general release targets for platforms or episodes beyond the first one due out for PC/Mac in January?

Rasmussen: The next few months are intense. January is an aggressive target, and we intend to hit it. We are finishing the 3D modeling/structural build out of the rest of the episode and recording scratch audio. Then there’s some play testing to verify structure. The next step is to go through and carefully re-record all of the audio for feel. Then we go through and either buy or record all the sound effects we need, the hardest of which will probably be the monster noises. Then there’s more play testing, revisions, and then sending it to sound engineers for environment feel and tweaking. After that comes deployment on Mac and PC. As soon as those are out of the gate, we are going back through and doing the iOS and Android versions.

DIYGamer: The game is set in a 3D world that players will never see. What are some of the challenges you guys run into making a game that people will not experience visually?

Rasmussen: That is a good question. One of the hardest things so far is making the game easy enough to navigate that it isn’t frustrating. The most difficult part of that is giving feedback to people about how far they’ve turned. I know it sounds simple, but we’ve found that speed of rotation is the hardest thing for people to get the hang of, especially if they’re not used to locating their position using fixed sound sources. We recently added an intro tutorial that walks you around the world a little. This helped considerably.

DIYGamer: For those who haven’t read about it yet, one of the main inspirations for this game is that you yourself were blinded temporarily in a high school chemistry accident. You speak a bit about that on your Kickstarter video, but (if you don’t mind) could you expand a bit on the accident itself, what those subsequent hours and days were like, and how they may have changed your perspective on everyday living?

Rasmussen: Sure. The accident itself involved an AP Chemistry class in a small town, no goggles, and the particularly volatile combination of red phosphorous and potassium chlorate. Those are actually the chemicals on the striking strip and match heads of safety matches. Usually it takes an impact to set it off, but the chemicals were brand new and opted for the more spontaneous route. Skipping the gruesome details, I was very badly burned in both my eyes and on my face. The corneas themselves on my eyes were burned, as well as a flash burn on the retinas, and blunt force trauma to the iris and lens. I woke up from coming off the emergency room drugs a day later and everything was black, and I had to go to the bathroom. My first real job, after picking strawberries, was as a digital video editor. I was really into film and the visual medium at that point, so losing my sight for an unknown amount of time should have been crushing.

The truth was, I was happy to be alive, and I adapted relatively quickly to navigating without sight. Once my face healed enough that I could open my eyes, sight started returning fairly quickly, starting at far past legally blind in the 20/800 range and as the corneas grew back, getting clearer and clearer. Even then, I was told I’d likely never be able to see properly because corneas have a tendency to heal in a wavy pattern that cannot be correct by lenses. It ended up alright though, and my vision went all the way back to 20/15 in one eye and 20/17 in the other. The whole experience made me value my sight more, and in a way makes me treat it with more care. On the flip side, I also learned that it is not the end of the world to lose it.

DIYGamer: Have you consulted with anyone that has a visual impairment regarding the title? If so, what have you taken from those conversations?

Rasmussen: Yes, my uncle has been blind from diabetes for about 15 years now, and I’ve spoken with him about the game a few times. He has yet to try out the tech demo, but we’re working on that. We were happy to learn that the “sliding” effect that we put in the game, so you can follow along surfaces like a wall or couch, is called “trailing” in the blind community. It’s just generally fun talking with him because he’s a clever and funny guy, but a couple interesting takeaways were about locational sounds in rooms, like music from speakers or the hum from your refrigerator. He told me a really amazing story about a kid who had been blind since birth and was terrified to go outside. He was smart and adept at getting around indoors, but just absolutely would not go outside. It turned out, people had described birds to him at some point, but failed to mention that they could fly. So his assumption was that birds were 30 feet tall, and could silently and quickly move from place to place at will. It was a great demonstration of how assumptions in an audio-only world change.

What’s interesting though, is that this game is written from the perspective of a sighted person losing their sight, not of a blind person.

DIYGamer: Could you indulge us a bit on the gameplay of Blindside? From the video it appears you control a character who tells you what they’re in need of, and what they feel around them; but how exactly does the core mechanic work in this game?

Rasmussen: The core mechanic feels a lot like Zork or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It has arrow-key controls that allow you to move about the world freely. You spend a lot of time running into things, hearing them described, and sliding along them to goals. Some people get the hang of it very quickly and it becomes an adventure game more like The Dig, where exploration is the main mechanic. It’s extremely linear though, to keep it from being frustrating. Mixed in with the core mechanic are essentially mini-games or puzzles. The first mini game is very simple and involves running for your life from a monster. They progressively get more difficult, but I don’t want to talk too much about them. The truth is, the audio-only nature of the game adds difficulty where there wouldn’t ordinarily be any, so some fairly simple tasks become time-consuming processes. I found this with my short stint of being blind. I was not well organized, and I remember it being extremely difficult to just find the shirt I wanted to wear. I had to touch every single one to figure it out.

DIYGamer: As far as immersion goes, voice acting and sound effects appear to be critical factors. Is there an added emphasis on the development in these areas, being that they’re so important to this experience in particular?

Rasmussen: There will be considerable added emphasis in the character and sound effects areas. Everything in the demo is scratch audio that we recorded, or cheap sounds we bought. We need much higher quality clips for sound effects, or to record them ourselves. Footsteps, in particular, have been more than just difficult to record in a satisfactory way. As far as the voices, they’ve all got to be re-recorded, especially as the script and tone have changed a little from what you hear in the game play. The voices are the primary way we convey the level of tension in the game, so getting those right is going to be key.

DIYGamer: There are so many fine lines when it comes to survival horror (cardiac moments vs. moments of respite, where puzzle elements fit in, throwing off the player without frustrating them, etc.) I know you’d prefer to save a lot of these discoveries for us when we get to play, but can you share a bit on what elements of the genre you’re looking to sprinkle into your game?

Rasmussen: This has been the subject of a lot of discussion in the dev process. As you can hear with the gameplay clip, the characters are ordinarily quite light-hearted. Not heard in the clip is when it goes south. We are trying to use the discovery/story moments as moments of respite, and mix in moments that combine both heart-pounding terror with the frozen, quiet fear you get in hiding. It’s going to be a very difficult balance to achieve, and we’ve found that it’s hard to get an honest review from someone who’s already tried the game once because the learning curve is steep but short. We’ll be successful if we can recreate that feeling you get when you’re running from something horrible, and then you’re hiding, listening to the blood pound in your ears, terrified that the sound of your heart will give away your presence as you fight to muffle your own breathing.

DIYGamer: Big thanks to Aaron Rasmussen for taking the time to answer our questions. Blindside Episode 1 is targeted for January 2012 on PC and Mac.