Alexander Bruce @Demruth Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Alexander Bruce

@Demruth

14,889

Followers

87

Following

812

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35,826

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I released Antichamber a long time ago. I'm currently deep down a rabbit hole exploring something else.

https://t.co/iJsPtyDFOm

Joined September 2010

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Hi Twitter... have a video update for once, after all my talk about tech, optimisations, bugs, etc. Perfectly seamless portals with accurate physics, rendering and collision. Long objects half sticking through double sided multi-entry portals... who needs that? Me, apparently!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 years

No. This was the opposite of what I wanted...

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

When I first released Antichamber, Valve suggested I add achievements, because they would help boost sales. I didn’t care then, and I don’t care 10 years later. “But we, the community, like achievements!” Cool. I, the creator, don’t want them in my game. I hate 90% of them!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Unreal does NOT just let you do this. I did this.

@Slaktus

Erlend Grefsrud

1 year

@Demruth This is profoundly upsetting. Unreal just lets you do this? What? How?

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Antichamber is 10 years old today. I will take this opportunity to reflect and say, I’m still not making Antichamber 2. I’m making something better.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 years

This is how we game developing. http://t.co/T2LOUeW9hv

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

I watched RRR again. I honestly think it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 months

Look, Talos Principle... I get it. You don't want this to be the solution, but you still wanted me to have visibility through to this puzzle piece... but you've given me a beam of light and a gate with giant gaps in it...

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

@TylerGlaiel I remember seeing a timelapse (of a different game) on r/gamedev that was like “3 years of development in 3 minutes!”, and my thoughts the entire time while watching was “when did they decide to make the game interesting?” They didn’t. It was a very generic thing, with polish.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Achievements. What a spicy topic. “I won’t buy your game” - It’s 10 years old. You already didn’t. Nothing changed because of what I said. “Without Steam features, why wouldn’t I just pirate your game?” - that’s fine. You would pirate it regardless, if this is your angle.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

When I was younger, I was obsessed with getting ahead in life. Looking at my years projected ahead of me, working out how I could get through them faster.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

If you ever create a piece of art you feel is meaningful, you don’t have to go off and compromise it because everyone expects you to. It’s one of the parts you control!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

"We released our game on Steam and it didn't sell" should not be considered a cautionary tale. It should be the base assumption while you make anything, and it's up to you to work out how to improve the odds of that not happening, in every way that you can manage.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 months

People talking about games degrees? In my final year I was selected to go to Japan to present a game I made at the Tokyo Game Show, which fell during the mid semester break. My lecturers said doing so would take a week away from my final year project, which was more important.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

After Antichamber, people often asked “What’s next?”, as though I had some bigger, better game idea that I wanted to make. I didn’t. I was burnt out on games, and it was difficult to process starting from scratch when I knew what it took to see something through to completion.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

“They add replayability!” - Games in general have a problem with not letting the player go. We understand compulsion loops, and exploit them constantly. It’s ok to enjoy something and move on from it. If you replay it, do it because you enjoy it, not because a list is unfinished.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

Haha. Running around in Antichamber again, I solved something, didn't end up where I wanted and was like "What the fuck? Did I ship a bug here? What happened?" And then realised that no, it's just the game. I got tricked the same as everyone else, because it's been sooooo long.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

@TylerGlaiel Nah it was a generic action shooter looking thing. But yeah, “we worked hard!” Is not a reason other people should care.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 months

There’s no real point to this story. Just my university showing that bureaucracy was more important to them than objectively positive outcomes for their students.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 months

The final year project was a bunch of unnecessary documentation for a made up project for a fake client. The game went on to become Antichamber, and at TGS I met key organisers of GDC and the president of Epic Games, opening up many opportunities.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 months

My degree was useful for introducing me to a lot of skills, but these key experiences during my final year felt completely in contrast to the point of receiving an education, and made me despise my university.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Look, in hindsight I think the real response to "How did you make Antichamber?" is "I was young and didn't have to deal with a whole lot of life that gets in the way as you get older"

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 months

Later on I was one of the five grand finals winners in Make Something Unreal, and had to fight my university for part of my prize, which they were making claim to, because I was a student and their name was listed as my school, even though I made it entirely at home, myself.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

To bring this full circle, I now struggle to think in terms of “getting ahead” in life, because my question becomes “getting ahead at what?” Adult life is too much of a sprawl to know what being ahead even means, so my focus is only on making life worth living.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 years

3 years sober.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

There has been an abundance of stress and anxiety in my life in the years since making Antichamber, but I’m glad other people could still find joy in what I’d made, even though I couldn’t. Thanks for playing.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

@Slaktus I have been working on my game for years. I was able to do a bunch of this stuff in the last 2 weeks because it was on the back of years of R&D and hell

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 months

This article understands what Antichamber actually is, the decisions it made, and why it exists more than anything I’ve ever seen written about the game. This person is going to have a field day with my next game.

@simbaoblivion

Simbabbad

3 months

Mise à jour de mon article sur Antichamber de Alexander Bruce ( @Demruth qui concocte un nouveau jeu): dix ans après, ce jeu est toujours un immense chef-d'œuvre, une expérience unique, que même des sorties récentes comme Manifold Garden n'ont pas égalé.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 years

So many games on the app store. How to choose between them??

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 years

My god. This video… it’s amazing:

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

I received another email asking me to put achievements in Antichamber. It's ok. I give you permission to just enjoy the game for what it is. Playing it because you found it interesting is its own achievement. They're not going to make it more fun, I promise.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

The reason I take so long to make things is because I like to meander and follow where ideas take me, rather than trying to force ideas into existence. This process doesn’t work if people are constantly asking me what I’m doing and judging every step of the way.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 month

Writing some very disgusting gameplay code because I don't know how to write it any better. I'll fix it later. (I'll never fix it)

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

If you ever feel like games are a mess of too many recycled or unbaked ideas, it’s in part because they’re trying to respond to all of this at once and be everything to everyone. I’m glad games occasionally exist as an oasis away from that.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

How it started vs How it's going

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

5 months

A bunch of people found Antichamber too hard. I have bad news for these people regarding my new game...

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

The reward for spending a life consumed by work was more of a life consumed by work. Social groups entirely defined by work. Interests that only revolve around work. Physical and mental wellbeing tied entirely to work. Anxiety during any moment that isn’t spent doing work.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

So you might think, Antichamber took somewhere between 3 and 7 years to make, why am I taking so long this time? Well… It took me 26 years to release my first commercial game, and may be around… *checks year* 13 years by my next one. So by that metric my pace will have doubled!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

I am one year sober today. :)

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

@_bombler There are definitely games (like Slay The Spire) where being forced into an unusual play style because of an achievement can be interesting. Personally I’d rather the reward / challenge was inside the game itself. I find most achievements annoying, distracting, or unnecessary.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 years

The best (worst??) thing about solo game development is that you can make bad decisions, and there's no one to stop you! No one to say, "hey, this is stupid. Stop it." You can just keep digging a hole for yourself! A really, really, really deep hole!!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

“I like them in my games!” - Great. I like EDM. Antichamber doesn’t contain that either, because it would also detract from the experience. I still enjoy hearing it elsewhere. “Lazy developer” - Choosing what to add and what to exclude is a core part of development.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

How to develop a video game: Step 1 - Make a bunch of interesting systems that don't play well together. Step 2 - Cry.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 years

Your English isn't that bad. Can't say the same about your macros, unfortunately.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

“This game didn’t do X, and look how well that did!” is not an argument that you never need to do X.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

19 days

There’s no shortage of people trying to cut you down throughout the creative process, and I have a couple of things to say about that. Feel free to share. :)

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

11 years

A game idea: "Shoot all the faces you don't recognize", and it shows random people mixed with Facebook friends. Deletes "friends" you shoot.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 month

Sometimes people ask why Antichamber doesn’t have a story or characters, and I genuinely wonder what kind of story they think would make the game better. I once had a long twitter DM with someone where they were like “but WHO is the protagonist? WHY does the Antichamber exist?”

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

11 years

XBox One? No I'm pretty sure XBox Lost.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

“You don’t care about the community” - I care about who the game was made for, not about the community I never intended to target in the first place. You don’t need to feel attacked because a product wasn’t made specifically for you.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

After Antichamber was successful, so many people asked "Why don't you start a studio?" "Why don't you hire people?" "Don't you want to give back to the community?" A bunch of them thought I was being selfish by responding with "I don't want to manage people."

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Pretty much nothing about this video worked over the past 4 years. Many of these problems were always things put off to the side for being too hard. I solved it all in... *checks Twitter Timeline*... just over 2 weeks.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

Awesome. I hope more AI chatbots hallucinate wrong answers that must be honoured so they also get taken down. Telling a customer that they should not have trusted information you gave them is the most frustrating customer experience ever and I have been in this situation before.

@arstechnica

Ars Technica

7 months

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

This is a surprisingly good video essay about Phil Fish: P.S. Phil’s a real nice guy IRL :)

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 months

Spent 5 hours on a call with a collaborator as they got to experience hands on time with the game after years of only seeing videos / hearing about it. They said: “There is nothing else like this. I mean, the closest thing is still Antichamber, but even then, not on this level.”

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 years

2 and a half years sober.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Opened Antichamber so that I could remember what the space felt like to exist in. It feels special to me again. Soothing and magical. And daunting... like, how the hell did I make all this? So many decisions and details. What I'm trying to make now is even more work. :\

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

This clearly reached outside my circle and is a good gauge of why its often necessary to shut out feedback that gets in the way of your work. Most of the negative responses are people generalising talking points, whereas development requires very specific decisions, constantly.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

I was already making a strong contender for weirdest game of 2025 or whenever the hell I’m done with this thing… but today, it may have just become a whole lot weirder, in the best way possible. A whole lot of pieces of the puzzle may have fallen into place. Time will tell.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 months

Creativity doesn’t have to be about money Creativity doesn’t have to be about the end product Creativity doesn’t have to be about other people Creativity doesn’t have to be about good output It’s ok to do things just because you wanted to do them. Allow yourself to be creative.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 years

Why hasn't anyone made Antichamber 2 yet? Cmon it's been like 8 years that I've been waiting.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

I no longer think anything is “wasting time”, it’s all just spending time differently. Everything I do is building up some life experience somewhere. Whatever I’m doing, that’s how I’m spending my time, until I decide to spend it doing something else.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Previously, I just ignored any interactions along the boundaries, and portals always needed gaps left behind them so objects could go through. Smoke and mirrors, basically. Now I don't have to care about any of that. The system just does what it's supposed to do.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

“Artists, and their ideals. It’s a business!” - Antichamber did incredibly well on a commercial level, whilst having something to say. You can be both. Without strong ideals to guide the work, you won’t get strong products.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

http://t.co/IJ7KEyGMde

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 months

Sometimes I rant about games because they try SO HARD to be “fun”, but miss out wildly on bringing joy. I think, am I old? Have I just seen too much? And then a find a piece of play equipment I’ve never seen before, and childlike wonder instantly returns. Capture this feeling.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Reposting for the night crowd because I never share videos of my stuff and people are enjoying this. :)

@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Hi Twitter... have a video update for once, after all my talk about tech, optimisations, bugs, etc. Perfectly seamless portals with accurate physics, rendering and collision. Long objects half sticking through double sided multi-entry portals... who needs that? Me, apparently!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

You guys! Look at this amazing bargain I found in a store in Berlin! Flappy Bird HD for PC for only 5 Euro!! http://t.co/e4MVCCGK5P

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Here, have another WIP test of a space before I fix all of the connections and make it actually have a purpose. This was me just wanting to see what it looked like first.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

ICYMI, the full 2 hours of Antichamber post-mortem: 7 years of process: http://t.co/ODtD6yUipb 3 years of design: http://t.co/3B2mD2Chyp

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

11 months

Ok Alex but what happens if multiple portals in different rooms are intersecting each other? I mean, it's confusing for sure, but nothing else really happens.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 years

Wow. The sign on this building is sweet. http://t.co/X0IaqCsW9A

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

I'm pretty happy just being some guy prodding away at a computer trying to make it do interesting things, and I self-selected out of "the industry" for the most part to get away from pressure from community and peers to produce bigger, better, more. It's not healthy.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Video games in 2023. In poetry by me.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

My IGS talk "An Overnight Success, Seven Years in the Making" is now free. Giving this talk at GDC was not easy. http://t.co/NWzLczMxFx

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

I can genuinely enjoy running around in Antichamber again and find it refreshing. I’ve grown enough distance from it to just appreciate it for what it is and what it does right, not mistakes here and there and a bunch of other ways I looked at it pretty negatively for many years.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

5 months

Ohhhh. Damn. Forgot about April Fools. Should have announced a sequel to Antichamber.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

Developing more empathy didn’t require money or resources or education. It required having lived experience, and engaging more closely with people around me.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 months

When I was making Antichamber, it used to annoy me that everything was built out of discrete units. Individual blocks. I wanted to manipulate geometry, and blocks were all I could manage at the time, but I always had a sense of "I wish I could just edit geometry vertices etc."

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

Just ran through the hard puzzles in Antichamber that lead to nowhere. This area was built when I had nothing left in me, and though there's no reward at the end of it, I'm glad it still exists. If I cut out everything that wasn't perfect, the game wouldn't have been released.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

I’m a much better programmer now than when I made Antichamber, despite taking a long break from making anything, because I don’t get caught up feeling insecure about whether or not someone better than me would be having an easier time of it all. I just solve problems and move on.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 years

"Hi I liked your game and wanted more of it. Please give me your source code, so I can develop it further." No? Make your own game. I never understand why people think these are reasonable emails. I'm even more baffled that people can get explosive when I decline their request.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Here Twitter. Have another random screenshot without context.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 month

“What are you working on?”

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

Over time, things became a bit less random, and a lot less garbage. I still won’t have anything to show for a long time, but what I have now is more interesting to me than what eventually became Antichamber.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

175k impressions in 24 hours. Glad people enjoy the video. :) Good thing for me to keep in mind for the days where I'm like "Why am I doing any of this? Do people care? Do I even care??" Looking forward to sharing more in the future, of tech that goes far beyond basic portals.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Still an occasional bug to chase down and still doing more work than it should, but I had this test scene rendering 300 unique perspectives at 60fps. Needless to say, the game under normal circumstances now is SMOOOOOOTH.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

10 years

Social media actively gets in the way of boredom, and boredom is massively useful for creativity.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

Solved one of the immersion breaking bugs in my game because of an argument I saw graphics programmers having on Twitter. The problem has been there from the beginning, as something to solve “some day”. Today was a good day.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

6 months

Don’t reduce ->everything<- you work on down to “but how will this make money?” It will make anything you do feel pointless.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

@TylerGlaiel Yes

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

9 years

This is a pretty good summary of why I mostly stopped playing AAA games years ago:

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

1 year

Fucking finally. FINALLY!

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

3 months

Very very refreshing to show people stuff I've been working on for years and have them be absolutely blown away, both by the game itself and by the writing. I take everything for granted because I've been looking at it for so long, and other people are like "no one does this!"

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

8 months

He says “what game?” I ask if he plays games, and he nods I go “ehh… I made a game called Antichamber” “What?” “Anti-Chamber” “Wait… no way. Are you serious?” “You know it?” “That’s a classic. I played it way back. I never thought I’d be talking to the guy that made that. Wow”

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

4 years

Good physical / mental health requires putting in time and effort every day to maintain my wellbeing, rather than letting it slip as a problem to fix tomorrow.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

The set of skills required for managing people successfully is not even remotely related to the skills I'm currently interested in working on to make the things I want to make.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Everything I make takes days of iterations and throwing away 80% of my work, for things that ultimately look like they could have been slapped together in about 5 minutes.

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

2 years

Hmmmmm. I was on UE4 for years throughout a pandemic and was fine. I use UE5 for a month and I suddenly test positive. COINCIDENCE???

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@Demruth

Alexander Bruce

7 months

I'll be honest. I don't even remember ever building this puzzle. My memory is not as infallible as it used to be I guess! Getting old, amirite?

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