Blind Love
What is Blind Love?
Blind Love is an eyetracking sidescroller adventure game. As the name indicates, an eye tracking device enables users to play the whole game using only their eye movement instead of default controls.
Blind Love is one of the first eyetracking games made in The Netherlands.
Why Blind Love?
Blind Love was created by a team of four HKU students for a school project called Happy Aging. The main focus of Happy Aging is to improve the lives of elderly people by tackling problems or dissatisfactions they are facing as a result of old age.
The mechanics of the game have been explicitly developed with the purpose of exercising elderly their eyes, vision and focus. Another benefit of the usage of an eyetracking device is the player’s ability to sit at a healthy distance from the screen and in a correct position, since no other external mouse and keyboard, are required. Originally, we wanted to go more deeply into the medical field with this game, to help improve eye- and vision problems elderly people are coping with. However, as we were not specialized in this particular field and only had limited time to spend on research, this idea was out of reach.
By means of scientific researches, we also found that eye- and vision problems that occur in elderly people (caused by age) are irreversible. So instead, we chose to focus on making a game which could help elderly keep their eyes active a
Blind Love was essentially designed for this specific target audience, but ended up being of great entertainment to people of all ages.nd trained, reducing their chance of developing issues in the future. The game also stimulates coordination and focus.
What does the player do ‘in game’?
In Blind Love, the player helps a blind mole on his journey. By using his eyes, he can interact with the game, and make sure the mole gets to his destination.
This short game works perfectly with only eye gazing, and is easy to play for all ages.
You need an eyetracking device to play the game, or you can use the mouse. Though eyetracking is highly recommended!
My role
Together with our lead designer Merlin, I worked a lot on the mechanics behind the puzzles. Art wise, I focused on the environmental assets: different types of trees, vegetation, houses, ground building blocks, underground building blocks, assets needed for puzzles and defining the overall atmosphere of the game. Foreground assets such as the concept and assets of the mole, animations, underground mole holes, story telling elements and the remaining puzzles were produced by my co-artist Floor Koens.
