A short game about one house, and the years that pass through it.
You put the kettle on. You get the door. You answer the phone.
The same house, four times over. You are smaller at the start than you are at the end.
Around twenty five minutes, first person, no combat and nothing to fail. blank. deals with a parent's illness and death, and it takes its time about the ordinary things in between.
Written, composed, designed and built by one person — including the engine it runs on.
blank. runs on EchoEngine — a C++ engine written in-house from the ground up, with its own level editor, Resonance. Real-time dynamic lighting, a full rigid-body simulation underneath every object in the house, and levels authored in a brush workflow. The same technology The Echo Engine is being built on.
Free, one download, no installer. Unzip it anywhere and run blank.exe.
I’ve finally managed to get it onto itch.io.
After trying to email them about the upload limit, it turns out I didn’t need to. I didn’t know Butler existed until this morning, and I had to facepalm myself — I was like, “That’s insane, man. Honestly.” Now we have blank. on itch.io.
In saying that, me and the team here at Quasi Interactive have been working intensely on The Echo Engine, and I hope everyone will be playing that game soon.
A day after releasing it, I found out that v1.0 couldn’t be finished.
The build that went up was missing two folders the game reads while it runs: the chat script that every conversation on the computer comes out of, and the levels for the Jump It! mini‑game. Neither of them lives under the assets folder, and the script that packed the release didn’t copy them. On my own machine every path still resolved, so nothing looked wrong in testing.
What that meant in the game: nobody ever messaged you on the computer, Jump It! wouldn’t start, and because chapters two and three are over when the talking is over, the corridor out of chapter two never unlocked. Anyone who downloaded v1.0 got as far as chapter two and stopped there.
v1.0.1 fixes it, along with everything else I found while I was in there — doors with a hitbox bigger than the door, the car keys sliding into a wall instead of under it, the last note coming to rest underneath a table, and the chapter transitions, which now blend the whole way across the corridor instead of snapping at the halfway point. The messages come in faster as well.
If you downloaded v1.0, please download it again. A save won’t get you past it.
The other thing I want to say: blank. is a result of where my head was at the time. There was a lot of shit going on in my personal life, but I’m thankful that I took that energy and pushed it towards game development — that’s what let me make it at all.
It’s not exactly a perfect game. There are a couple of things I want to work on in the future. If I made another game like this, I’d spend a lot more time developing the characters and developing the story; this is very much a stripped-back version of that kind of game.
But my next step right now is to work on The Echo Engine, the game — and on making the engine itself better along the way. I really hope that goes somewhere.
So this is my first game, and I’ve finally released it.
The experience I got out of it is something I can look back on and really appreciate. I made it with my own custom game engine, EchoEngine 1.0, and my own in‑house level editor, Resonance, which is where the house itself was built.
There were a couple of hurdles. I ended up releasing on Game Jolt because itch.io wouldn’t let me upload more than a gig, and the game is 1.6 GB — so that was the way around it. My original plan was Steam, but I don’t have the funding for that.
But yeah, I’m really happy that I managed to finally release a project after all this time. I’ve wanted to make games since I was six, and it started with the Penumbra tech demo — that’s what really inspired me. I love horror, and I love that whole feeling you got out of the HPL engine.
So, again, as I said in my note to Frictional Games: thank you for inspiring me.