Build a Rocket Boy talks MindsEye, Everywhere and the inevitable GTA comparisons

The build-up to Build a Rocket Boy’s debut release has been a confusing one at times.

When it was announced that Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies had formed a new Edinburgh studio, it took so long for the company to show its hand that speculation ran rife, with some certain that its first title would be focused around NFTs (as was the trend at the time).

When the studio finally opened its doors to the media in early 2023, I was in attendance in its Leith office to get the first proper details on Everywhere, its ambitious Fortnite-like metaverse.

The studio had another surprise on that day – it wasn’t working on one triple-A game, but two. The other one, a gritty open-world action adventure called MindsEye, would be available exclusively through Everywhere, similar to the way Fortnite is the platform that hosts Epic-developed rhythm action, racing and Lego survival games.

Two years later, the situation has chaned. MindsEye is – for now, at least – a standalone release, set to be the first game published under Hitman studio IO Interactive‘s new publishing label.

Not only is MindsEye no longer tied to Everywhere at launch, the reveal of a new creation suite split into two modes called Play.MindsEye and Build.MindsEye appear to be offering the sort of vision promised by Everywhere.

With MindsEye only day away from release, I sat down with assistant game director Adam Whiting at the IO Interactive Showcase on Friday,  to discuss the studio’s apparent switch in focus and what that means for Everywhere.

I visited Build a Rocket Boy a couple of years ago for the Everywhere reveal. At that time Everywhere was obviously the main focus, whereas MindsEye was an adventure that was going to be one part of the overall Everywhere package. What’s changed?

Ultimately, I don’t think that really anything changed. I mean, from my perspective, it doesn’t really feel like there’s much change at all.

Whilst we’ve got a big development team, and part of the team was focused on Everywhere for a while, probably a larger part was always focused on MindsEye. A game of this kind of quality and scale needs a lot of artists, needs a lot of coders, needs a lot of everything, right? Needs a lot of love. So, you know, nothing’s really changed too much.

And I think, ultimately, Everywhere was – and is – a key part of the platform we’re trying to build, and particularly it was a perfect lens and vehicle through which we could experiment with the build tools. And I’m sure you probably noticed that the build tools that we’ve got in MindsEye are exactly the same as ones in Everywhere, you know what I mean? So, we’ve kind of field-tested them a little bit.

We’ve got some great feedback from our community, our builders, and now we’re ready to unleash them on the MindsEye audience. So, we’re really excited about that.

So, when you say the build tools are the same, is that down to the same granular level? Because when I was shown the Everywhere demo two years ago we were shown how a player could, for example, create a large octopus enemy and program the behavioural AI for each of its tentacles. Is it still that detailed?

Yes. It’s all exactly the same system of tools. The logic system’s the same, the stamp system’s the same. That interoperability between the worlds is super important.

The technology has always been designed to be highly compatible, so you can jump between different types of experiences, with MindsEye, Everywhere and other fun things in the future as well.

The concern some people have been having is that that Everywhere’s gone now, but you’re saying Everywhere is still very much a going concern?

Yeah. I mean, I can’t say too much about it right now, but expect it to re-emerge. Ultimately, we want to unify everything so you come to one place and you’ve got access to all of the different Build a Rocket Boy experiences, whether it’s Everywhere, whether it’s MindsEye.

And then obviously, with MindsEye we’ve got a brilliant story we’re really, really happy with, and we’re going to continue to add more content. We’ve got teams already working on future content. Every few weeks will be new stuff. We’ve already got stuff ready to go, even more stuff to come.

Some of it’s story-based, it expands the story and builds up the world of characters. Others are just kind of fun slices of gameplay, and that’s what’s great about this – it kind of lets us have our cake and eat it.

Normally, you come up with a cool idea or something, and it’s like “oh, that’s really fun, but is it going to work with the story? Oh no, no, Jacob would never do that”. Or “this doesn’t work because the technology doesn’t work”. We can just put it in the Play.MindsEye menu and just then players can enjoy it, it doesn’t detract from the narrative.

So if you’ve got all this content planned for MindsEye, should players read into that as MindsEye being your main focus for the time being? That Everywhere will come in the future but for now MindsEye is what players should be focusing on?

Yeah, I think certainly, right now, MindsEye is definitely the thing that people should be focusing on. But we haven’t forgotten about Everywhere, it will re-emerge. We’re really excited to share those plans, with probably a few surprises for people as well.

Because it’s all been part of the grand plan, it’s always been part of this vision of a unified platform where our technology and everything’s completely seamless and interoperable. So you have different types of experiences that appeal to different types of players.

But really, what we’ve been really focused on is just delivering a really great story, a really great game with MindsEye, and then through Play.MindsEye and Build.MindsEye you’ve got kind of endless streams of content, you know what I mean?

Particularly on PC, you’ve got access to the same tools that we’ve used to build everything you see in Play.MindsEye. There’s no special developer version of it or anything like that.

As we use it, we’re tasting our own cooking to a certain extent, so if our team of level designers who are using Build to make content were like “it’d be really great if I had this cool function or feature, or this thing that would allow me to do all of this”, then great, okay, we’ll give it to them. And that means players have got it as well.

And we’re going to keep adding to this rich tapestry of gameplay over time with different types of gameplay, different types of experiences. And next on this, we’re going to be doing multiplayer later on in the year, and then we’re going to transition to a more open-world paradigm in the next episode of MindsEye, and then that opens the gates to full open-world multiplayer experiences. And with players being able to build their own, we think that’s going to be really exciting.

Speaking of the open world paradigm – because Build a Rocket Boy was founded by Leslie, there’s obviously going to be comparisons with GTA. I’d imagine his pedigree would have been helpful in getting the studio established in the first place, but now that we’re at the point where MindsEye is just coming out, is it now casting a shadow that you can do without? Do you now hope the GTA references stop and people focus on MindsEye for what it is?

A hundred percent. You know, I think we’ve been very mysterious, and obviously Leslie’s got a great reputation, a great name, a great history. And that is a blessing.

But then also, we’ve always from the very beginning had this earnest desire to build something new, something different, something unique, something to stand apart, stand on its own. And then there’s also the fact we are just a kind of small studio in comparison to some of the bigger studios, you know what I mean?

And really, we’re independent. We want to keep that independence as well, because it allows us to do things that we want to do, things that excite us, things that excite the team. And that’s a really great place to be.

So, you know, I understand why people make comparisons, but it’s certainly nothing that we’ve ever thought about too much when making the game. We just wanted to build something that we were really happy with, that excited us, and I’m really, really happy and pleased and proud of where we’ve got to with MindsEye.