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MindsEye is a Hollywood-grade shooter that you build yourself, and it's out now
J
Jason Fanelli
We're seated in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, moments after IO Interactive's first-ever IOI Showcase on June 6. Adam Whiting, the Assistant Game Director for Build A Rocket Boy, is discussing MindsEye, a new third-person shooter shrouded in mystery that just came out. MindsEye was first announced back in 2022, and other than a few small pieces of information here and there, we don't really know much about it. Whiting says that's by design.
"I think there's something really powerful about when you show someone something really cool," Whiting explains. "And then you say, 'you don't have to wait two years for this, it's going to be available really quickly.'"
It's not just third-person action that awaits MindsEye players when they purchase the game, either—included with a game is a toolset that, in the right hands, can be the next major user-generated content craze. That's what BARB is banking on.
What the heck is MindsEye?
MindsEye is a third-person shooter that features a 14-to-18-hour campaign that follows Jacob Diaz, a former soldier who at some point received a neural implant known as the MindsEye. Diaz repeatedly experiences vivid flashbacks that he has no firsthand knowledge of, so he heads to an American desert city called Redrock to figure out what's going on with his MindsEye.
Whiting describes it as a "tightly crafted linear narrative action-adventure" with "high cinematic value." One of the major components of that, as shown in the IOI Showcase trailer, is the seamless transitions between cinematic cutscenes and live gameplay. Whiting refers to this as a player being able to "follow a path through your favorite action movie."
"The best example I can give from the modern era is when you're bingeing your favorite TV show, or going through a marathon reading section in a book," Whiting explains. "The quality of the narrative is what's driving you through it, and we've tried to preserve our own thrilling sequence of gameplay, where you go from action set piece to action set piece seamlessly."
The gameplay trailer shown during the IOI Showcase invoked the third-person shooter era of the mid-to-late 2000s—games like Epic's own Gears of War, Uncharted, etc.—and Whiting explains that this was the team's approach from the beginning.
"We've got some unique flourishes to our combat and driving that are unique to us, but we don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel," Whiting says. "We don't have to do everything from scratch."
Despite this, Whiting notes that MindsEye does have a feature that involves creating a game from scratch, and that is what has him most excited about the game finally releasing to the public.
MindsDIY
Included with every copy of MindsEye is a creation suite that mirrors that of the Build A Rocket Boy team. Everything the team used to bring MindsEye to life is available to the player, as simplified or as complicated as the player wants it to be, and they can use it to create adventures of their own right from the get-go.
Whiting says that some players may want more after finishing the main MindsEye adventure, and these creation tools will allow them to get more through creating their own chapters. In fact, the team at BARB is using this in-game toolkit to experiment with what's possible in-game already, and that information is then used in the actual devkits to keep the game growing.
"Games are big expensive things to make," Whiting says, "If you spend months trying to build something and it doesn't work, you've got to throw it away and that's money and time wasted. Now, we've got this tool that allows us to try out new ideas, be creative, and then also give those tools to players."
How did Build A Rocket Boy get this out into the world for internal testing without people knowing what their plans were? How were they able to maintain this secrecy? The answer, as Whiting explains, is everywhere—or should we say Everywhere, the original project announced by BARB back in 2022 along with MindsEye.
Everywhere was, as Whiting explains it, a way to "field test the tool with authentic players in the wild without tipping our hands to what MindsEye was." That's not to say that Everywhere isn't coming back—Whiting says it'll be back "in an interesting way"—but MindsEye is serving as the foundation for the future of what Build A Rocket Boy is trying to do.
Whiting says the toolset included in MindsEye is the same tool set that will appear in Everywhere when it re-emerges, and that both will work together seamlessly. "When Everywhere comes back, if you want to build stuff in there, whatever you create will be portable and accessible in MindsEye," he explains, "and it's very satisfying when we see it in action internally."
The toolset allows players to be as granular as they want when sharing things thanks to what Whiting calls the "stamp system." In it, anything built within the toolkit—be it an entire level, a gameplay setpiece, or a single asset—can be shared separately through this stamp system, and it will become part of the full, ever-growing asset library of MindsEye and Everywhere.
If this sounds intimidating, don't worry; this toolset has you covered there, too. "We've got tutorials that streamline the creation and sharing process, allowing new players to learn quickly," Whiting confirms, "as well as a few systems designed as shortcuts, like a hot bar where players can drag-and-drop categories they're currently most interested in—vehicles, geometry, characters, etc.—and have access to that category without having to dig through the whole library."
It's clear that ambition is overflowing at Build A Rocket Boy based on what the team is planning with MindsEye and Everywhere, but Whiting is confident that ambition will turn into something players will love. "I'm really excited for players to go on this journey with us," he says. "I think we're in a really good place."
MindsEye is available now on Epic Games Store.