Alexander Bruce

Description

History

Alexander Bruce began his development career in 2006 by trying to recreate basic games like Snake and Asteroids in Unreal Tournament 2004. Through a series of naive programming mistakes, he accidentally created systems for manipulable geometry and recursive space that would go on to define the next 7 years of his life, as he explored the ideas further and tried to work out how to turn them into a game.

A failed arena combat game, a single player puzzle game full of dead end ideas, a year of work in industry and the impending end of his university degree led him on a voyage of self-discovery that somehow resulted in a non-Euclidean philosophical art piece title "Hazard: The Journey Of Life". By the end of his university degree, Alexander had already spoken at the Tokyo Game Show and picked up a handful of awards for his work, so he then decided to create a standalone release of Hazard using the newly released Unreal Development Kit.

With an unusual game to market on his hands, Alexander looked for more festivals to enter as a way of gaining additional exposure, with the mindset that if the game wasn't good enough to win any more awards, he would release it and move on. With every nomination he received from that point, Alexander raised the bar of quality higher and looked towards bigger, better festivals to enter, still with the mindset that he would release when it stopped being nominated in festivals. This process continued for the next 3 years of development, sending Alexander around Australia, throughout America, back to Japan and to China. Along the way, Alexander discovered the psychological theme behind the mechanics and renamed the game to Antichamber in preparation for its commercial release.

In March 2012, Alexander won the award for Technical Excellence at the Independent Games Festival and declared his retirement from competitions, having received over 20 honours throughout the development of Antichamber. After several years of blood, sweat and tears, he is now finally almost ready to release his first independent game to the world.

Projects

• Antichamber