Antichamber: An Overnight Success, Seven Years In The Making

Good morning everyone. My name is Alexander Bruce and I'm the creator of Antichamber, a mindbending psychological exploration game that was released on Steam at the beginning of last year. Before I begin, I want to say thank you to the IGS organizers for inviting me here today because GDC, the IGS, the IGF were very important to my development. 5 years ago, I was sitting in this room for the first time as someone just starting out and I was looking at the people on stage thinking, "These guys have made it." and I want to know what they did. And I'm happy to share my story with you today of how I went from there to where I am now, which is here. Prior to the game's release, it was the IGF 2012 winner for technical excellence. The game was backed by the Indie Fund. It had been covered many, many times by most major news sites. After the game was released on the 31st of January, the game went on to sell 100,000 copies within 7 weeks and lifetime sales are now at around 750,000 copies with around $5 million gross

revenue. So the question that I'm here to talk about today is how this happened. You know, was it just a good idea? Did I know the right people? Or was I just very very lucky? This is going to come up a couple of times throughout the talk, but I'm going to start this talk by just giving you some of my philosophy on luck that was driving a lot of my decision-m and it's that first and foremost, if luck is in everything, then it made sense to me to factor it out of everything. That's not to say that it doesn't exist, but it's something that I don't control. And so, I'm going to factor it out of all my my business decisions. And when you do that, it means that you have to take all of the other things on this slide much more seriously. And I believe if you do a good job of that, you should at least be able to be successful. And then if you get lucky, whatever that means, you're then more successful. Luck is a multiplier on your efforts. I don't believe it should be the thing that makes or breaks your success. And one of the reasons that I want to say that is when we're looking at other people's successes or failures. We don't have all of the information. And we use luck to describe things that we don't completely understand. And I realize

that there's a very big difference between the public perception of what happened and the reality of what happened. So today I'm here to talk about reality and I want to do this because 5 years ago this is where I started. I was a student. I came from Melbourne, Australia, which is not an area that was known for making independent hits. This was my first independent game. And I was working on it alone from a bedroom. But I did have one question that set me apart from the rest of my cohort at the time. And that was this. What makes me different to people that I would deem to be successful? This was not an entitled question like why aren't I successful? This was a genuinely curious question. like what did these people do and is that something that I can do as well? But it would actually be a bit unfair to say that this was the starting point because even this question had to come from somewhere. I did not just wake up one day and wonder what made me different. So I'm going to jump back very briefly to 9 years ago when I first got into anything games related at all. I was a student starting out in university and I went into that with a very simple philosophy. Pick any individual skill and I can guarantee

that I will not be the best person at it. I am not the best artist because I've not been drawing since I was 10. I'm not the best programmer because I don't do it as a day job. My skill set as a very technical, creative, analytical person is to be very, very different as a strategic decision. And I was doing this so that I could stand out in university so that that could then get into industry. And then I was going to stand out in the industry so that I could get promoted and get hired overseas, which was where I actually wanted to work. And so in 2006 when I was introduced to modding tools for Unreal Tournament 2004, I made things like this. I made a world full of tiles that I called dynamic geometry that I could sweep complex algorithms across and get them to respond in all kinds of interesting ways. And I turned this into a multiplayer arena combat game. It was very violent and I decided to call this thing Hazard. But when I tried to run this across a network, way too much stuff was going on. And I did I was not a network programmer at the time, so I put it down. In 2007, that other one got way too big, way too fast. So I thought, I'm just going to start small again. I just want to see what asteroids would look like in 3D. which meant that when I

have to deal with the screen wrapping, I then have to deal with rendering perspective through the screen wrapping as well. So I made this thing called recursive space. And again, it was an interesting system, but I didn't know what to do with it at the time, so I put it down. But what these systems did was they got me hired to work in industry 2 and a half years through a 4-year degree. So my plan of standing out was definitely working. But working in industry actually made me quite jaded because one of the first things that happened was my Unreal Engine 3 game that I was hired for got cancelled which took a lot of the core skills and just threw them out the window. And I then had the opportunity to move on to an infrastructure team which was a great learning experience because I was there as a junior in my first year and there were four uh seniors the lead programmer and the technical director of the company which at the time had about 180 people but the whole time I was there I thought how am I supposed to compete with these guys and obviously no one was expecting that but from a self-satisfaction level it was really demotivating and it just made me feel inadequate and I started to doubt whether or not I was actually a programmer. Towards the end of the year,

I also had to go through months of crunch in a game that I ultimately didn't think was very good. And the situation wasn't much better elsewhere in Australia. 2008 2009 is when the Australian industry started folding in on itself. But it's also the year that I discovered independent development. And I was looking at some of these guys, particularly the nebacula drop guys, thinking these guys have these guys have figured it out. They've circumvented the system. It's a team of students who made a game that was very good. They went through some festivals. They got hired by Valve and then they made Portal. They went straight from the bottom to the top. And so I was looking at all of these guys thinking, what makes me different to them? They circumvented the system. How can I do this as well? And one of the things that I noticed about all of these guys was they went through festivals. So I thought, all right, that's the answer. I'm going to go through festivals. And one of the festivals that was very applicable to me was this thing called Make Something Unreal. Now, I'd actually found out about this four years earlier randomly one day when I walked into my brother's room and he was looking at the list of grand prize winners and he said, "Man, wouldn't it be cool to be one of these guys?" And I was like, well, yes, but I know nothing about modding. I don't know how to make a game. And here I was 4

years later. I still didn't consider myself a modder, whatever that meant. But I did have an unusual game. I did know how to make things in Unreal. And I decided, I'm going to play this the same way that I play the education system. I'm going to submit something radically different. And I'm going to wait until the very end of the year, and then I'm going to submit something, and I'm going to surprise people. And that was this thing that I've been working on called hazard the journey of life which was it started off with my geometry and space prototypes and then I added a branching map structure. I removed death. I made all kinds of weird choices and it was ultimately something that was just for me. It was this little philosophical art piece that I was using as a diary as I was working out what I was doing in my life. And I decided that if I wanted to stand out, the visuals were going to be one of the first things that people saw. And one advantage that I had was everything else that was going through the competition ultimately still looked like an Unreal game. And you could see AAA games also just looked like Unreal Engine 3 games. And I thought they're all differentiating themselves with art, but they use similar lights and shaders. I don't have the time, resources, or skill to compete on that level. So, I'm

going to go completely down the other end of the spectrum and submit something looks absolutely nothing like something that was made with Unreal. And in 2009, Sense of Wonder Night was another competition that announced its second year. And I'd found out about Sense of Wonder Night the previous year because Ian Dallasos went through this as well. So I was looking at Ian Dallas thinking what makes him the creator of the unfinished swan different to me. He's a student from USC. I'm a student from Melbourne. His game has an interesting um art style and theme. So does mine. His game's about exploration and discovery as is mine. So I entered Sense of Wonderite as well. And fortunately for me I got picked which represented a very large opportunity. you know, I'd never been outside of Australia and I'd never been to one of these big gaming conventions and here I was presenting something that I'd made in Japan. And so I thought I may never be in this position again. So if an opportunity comes up, whether that's speaking with someone, attending a session using a piece of technology, I have two options. If I do nothing, I know exactly what will happen.

Absolutely nothing will happen because I didn't try to make something happen. If I do follow up on an opportunity, something might happen. Maybe something good. maybe something bad, but the fact that I don't know is the reason that I must follow up on every single opportunity. And one of those opportunities, was talking with this guy, Mike Caps, the president of Epic Games. He gave a keynote there and when it ended, I walked up to him and I I handed over a business card. I hesitated and I said, "Hi, my name is Alexander Bruce. Um, I've created this this mod for Unreal Tournament. I'm presenting it at this thing called Sense of Wonder Night. I was just wondering, do you have a solution for independent developers?" And his answer was, "Well, yes, actually. We have this thing called the Unreal Development Kit. It's not announced yet, but I will put you on to Mark Rain and we will find a solution to your problem. And this response really surprised me because here's the president of a very large international corporation reaching out to me, some random student. And this taught me that everyone in this industry is just another person. At some stage in this guy's career, he was where I was that day starting out.

I also had the chance to talk with Steve Swink who was presenting his game Shadow Physics there and he was one of the co-chairs of the IGF at the time. And as we were having a conversation one day, he said, "You should join the indie community." I said, "Uh, I don't know. Like, I couldn't write my own engine." And he said, "You could totally write your own engine. You should go to GDC and you should meet these people because you'd fit right in." And what these kinds of conversations did was they they reaffirmed my belief that festivals were a great way to get noticed. I never had the opportunity to speak to some of these people back home in Australia. So I thought I'm going to enter every festival that exists just so I can keep on talking to all of these people. I got selected for make something unreal and I won an Australian competition. So started to get a bit confident thinking all right I've figured this out. I'm the same as those people from 2008. And I didn't get in. I got an honorable mention and my first reaction was like what? Why aren't I in there? Surely my game is as good as all of the other games that got picked. Then I decided like what makes me different? Like what have I missed? So, I went back and I looked at some of my other successes and I said, "Well, clearly something is different here. Clearly, I'm missing

something." I looked at Sense of Wonder and I said, "All right, Sense of Wonder Night was a new competition. 66 games were entered and of them 11 of them were picked. That's a one in six chance. It's not a guarantee, but those are very good odds." And I did well in Make Something Unreal because Epic didn't expect such such an unconventional game. And when I spoke to them later about it, they were like, "Honestly, man, we have no idea what the hell you did with our engine, but it was really good, so we thought you should get a prize. Whereas the IGF was very used to showcasing different and exceptional games. And this taught me that being different in amongst a sea of other different games is just a different kind of same. You're not going to stand out that way. I later learned a more useful term which was remarkable. Not fun, not innovative, not polished, remarkable, worth making a remark about. This could either mean that you're conventional and absolutely exceptional or it could mean you're different and executed very, very well. or it could mean that you are so completely insane that people are just like, I don't know, this could be the future of games.

So, I picked myself up and starting out in 2010, I'm like, "All right, this is just the start of my independent career." I was one of the grand finals winners in Make Something Unreal, which gave me around $25,000, which I just invested straight back into the game over the next couple of years. I could use the Unreal Development Kit to make a commercial version, so my mod, which was worth nothing, could now be worth something. And in February 2010, I was contacted by Valve to put the game on Steam. And this confused me a bit because I didn't reach out to them and I certainly hadn't had a lot of press at this stage. So I sent email I sent an email to Epic and I said, "Do you guys know anything about this?" And they said, "Well, yeah, we thought your game was really good, so we told Valve that they should take it." And this taught me the power of advocates. I didn't have to make the connection with Valve at that stage myself cuz I had a connection with Epic and they could close that connection for me. So, with all of these new circumstances, I decided to take Steve Swing's advice and go to the game developers conference. And at the GDC, I did what you would expect from someone at their first conference. I ran around having a lot of short conversations with people, handing out business cards to as

many people as I could, trying to spread my name around because I realized I'm not the first person to try and make a successful game, and I wanted to learn from what other people had done. I didn't want to make all of my own mistakes. And I was also invited to speak at this thing called the Novo Sessions. And I was invited because of my honorable mention at the um IGF, but also because I'd been keeping in touch with Steve Swink since sense of wonder and him and Matthew Wgner were the people who organized this thing and they thought I had some interesting things to say. So going into this, I thought, all right, once again, I may never be in this position again. I may never get the chance to speak at GDC again, but I want people to remember me. So I'm going to give I'm going to give them three things to remember me by, and I don't care which one they remember. They're going to see either a crazy passionate speech about risk and experimentation or they're going to see a very weird abstract game or they're going to remember that someone wore a pink suit and I didn't care which. And this taught me that being different can be very polarizing. Some people were totally on board with my eccentricity and they thought that the presentation was very theatrical. Other people looked at me

and were like, "What a weirdo." And this was something that I was going to have to be careful about because I wanted to stand out, but I also wanted to be taken seriously. I also had some interesting conversations at GDC. On the final day, there was a party and it was a secret party and a bunch of my new friends were going to it. And I kept on asking, "Can I come?" And they were like, "Ah, I don't know. Like, you know, it's it's not really my thing. I'm not sure." And as we were hanging out in the park just before a bunch of people were going, I asked Heather Kelly, I was like, "Can I come?" And she said, "Uh, I think I think you can bring a friend. let me check the invite. She checked and she said, "Yep, you can come as my plus one." And I thought about what other people had said and how it seemed like a bit of a secret. And I said, "You know, I don't really know the hosts and I'm not really anyone, so I'm just going to go back to my hotel." And she said, "Um, I think you need to familiarize yourself with the phrase fake it till you make it." Now, this is a totally cliched thing to say, but at that point in time, those were the exact words that I needed to hear. You know, stop doubting yourself. Stop saying, "I'm not indie. I'm not a moto. I'm not a programmer. I'm not a designer." and say if you want

to be someone, start being someone right now. At this uh party, I also had the chance to speak with Mayor Shepard who was one of the people who um helped make N plus and she was one of the people who was on the Novo jury and I was lamenting the fact that I didn't get in and she said, "I really enjoyed playing a game. It was exactly the kind of puzzly thing that I like. I encourage you to not get discouraged and keep in mind that the jury changes every year." So here's someone who's been through this before, who knows what they're talking about, saying, "You're almost there. just try again next time. And all of these conversations taught me the value of real networking. Most of the cards that I'd handed out randomly to people didn't do anything at all. I never heard back from any of them. Whereas real networking was building genuine relationships with people. You caring about them, them caring about you, so that over time you can both help each other out and help each other rise up to the top. So after GDC, I thought, right, this is a very big change in circumstances. I know way more now than I did going into it. So, I'm going to take another three months to continue working on my game. And in that three

months, I got selected for Indicade at E3. And I know that this pink suit was polarizing, but I thought once is not a science, so I'm going to find the day with the most cameras around, and I'm going to wear it again. And I immediately noticed in the morning when I did this, that people were coming up to me saying, "I loved your GDC talk. I want to try and play your game." And this taught me that I was very good at getting people interested in wanting to try my game. And then at E3, they'd sit down. and they'd play it for 5 minutes and then they'd get up and they'd leave because the game wasn't holding people's interests. And I could have justified this at the time by saying, well, you know, it's E3. This is a big event. There's so much interesting stuff around. I didn't do that cuz I thought when I'm trying to get press about this game, when I release the game on Steam, this is all going to these are all going to be very crowded markets. My game should be able to hold people's interest more than everything else around. I need to solve this problem. And also learned a bunch of marketing lessons. Standing around for 3 days trying to explain what the hell I was making despite having a very difficult problem to begin with was was extremely difficult. And I learned over time that the reason this is difficult is because

you need to get good at explaining your game in a way that people who have no context will understand. You have all the context. They have none. And and that's what you have to get good at. And you need to get good at it if you want people to care because you're going to have to make trailers later. You're going to have to talk with the press later. You're going to have to make interesting store pages. And that takes a lot of practice and experience to get good at. So after the show when I was looking at what kind of press coverage I got, there was a feature on IGN and there was about how to stand out at E3 and there were some other mentions but there wasn't this like immediate explosion of interest and everyone caring about me. So I'm looking at these other games that did seem to have all of this coverage and I was like what did they do? Like what have I missed out on? And I thought all right well one of the most obvious ones is is that people weren't playing the game for long. It wasn't holding their interest. they couldn't see all of the things that I found were so interesting about it. And watching people directly revealed a hell of a lot of issues to me. I knew exactly what I needed to fix. And so from this point, I then continued testing the game constantly on people at home, sending it to festivals, watching people at um conferences, etc. because I wanted to

understand how people thought. I wanted to understand what would make this game interesting to people. And this taught me a lesson about refinement. The higher in quality any individual aspect of your game gets, the more other areas start to stick out as wrong. And so the fact that my design was now getting much, much better meant that the absence of sound design was becoming a real problem. Throughout the rest of 2010, I continued trying to enter these competitions. And after a string of good fortune, I then had a lot of misfortune. I didn't get into the PAX 10. I didn't get into the Indicade Festival. And I was crunching constantly because all of these deadlines were really close together. And this was making me very, very physically sick doing this. I wasn't getting enough done. So, I was working longer, which meant I was sleeping less, which meant I was becoming sick, which meant I was ultimately getting less work done. And I was struggling at this stage. And I'm thinking, what makes me different to these other people? Am I struggling because I'm not good or am I struggling because this is hard? So, I thought, I have to go to Indicade despite not getting into the festival because I need to know the answer to that. I need to talk to people about

this. On the way to indicate, I also had to stop off at GDC online for another competition. And this one had a $100,000 had a $100,000 prize. Trying to not set any expectations about a prize that ultimately has $100,000 is pretty difficult. And so I didn't win and I just got really burned by expectations. Again, it's a very difficult lesson to learn not to do that. But I was seeing signs of progress. Earlier issues that I'd seen at E3 were now gone. But then I was just seeing later issues now. Now I was just seeing issues 20 minutes through rather than 5 minutes through. I met Robin Arnut, my sound design, so we could get the sound design up to the same quality as everything else. And I was also getting increasing interest from publishers, and I thought, all right, maybe these guys could help out because, you know, there are things I'm struggling with. They're used to dealing with this kind of stuff, and maybe they could help with consoles, which were becoming more of a big deal at the time. And when I went to Indicate to talk to people about this, Ron Carmel said, "Don't go with a publisher. If you can get this game green on a console, I will fund you myself." Now, this was after the Indie Fund announcement as they were working out what kinds of games they should fund. And I think this was him

looking at the game saying this publishers are just going to ruin what you're trying to make with this game. So I will find you myself if necessary. And I also spoke with Daniel Ben Medigi and after indicate I said I was going to go to Japan to try and have some time off because sense of wonder like was really refreshing for my mental state. And he said going to Japan alone won't solve your problem. You're doing really well but you need to slow down or you will just keep making yourself sick. You need to change your mindset about this. you know, this was a marathon and I was sprinting the entire time. So, I went to Japan. I came back and then I then things started to turn around. I get in I got into the IGF China. I got into the IGF. I'd upgraded my honorable mention for the Novo up to a finalist for the Nobo. And I got nominated in the Indie Game Challenge, another $100,000 competition, which I also didn't win. But DICE was interesting because it was an executive conference and a lot of important people were there. So, knowing that Ron said he would fund me, I would also have to deal with an engine license. And so, I spoke with Mike Caps and Mark Rain again, who

I'd spoken with several times throughout the year, and I told them this problem. They said, Mark said, "Well, we can give you an engine license." And I said, "I I can't afford that." And he's like, "It doesn't matter. We use the UDK to filter people. We'll just give you a license under the same terms, and then that solves that problem." So, knowing I've got funding and a license, I then started following up things very seriously with Sony and Microsoft trying to make something happen. I was also making some good connections with the press at this time and these were all editor-inchiefs of various websites or most of them. And I started having some interesting questions come up because some of these guys were like, "How are you going to appeal to the Call of Duty crowd?" Or, "My daughter loves Minecraft. Why would she play this?" And these were obviously very frustrating questions because I wasn't trying to aim at the Call of Duty crowd. But the fact that people were asking these questions was very interesting because people were no longer just dismissing this game as some artistic thing. Now they're actually concerned about how I was going to find an audience for it. And Dino Patty was there with Limbo and he could see that I was obviously very frustrated by some of these questions. And he said, "Ignore everything those guys said. We

were getting asked the same questions before Limbo was released. You're doing fine. Keep doing what you're doing." So like with Steve, like with Mayor, these are people who know what they're talking about, who've been through this before, saying, "You're on the right track. Just stay on target." And Jamie Chang was one of the judges of the indie game challenge. And he enjoyed playing the game, but he said, "Why is it called Hazard?" And I justified it to him and he said, "That's interesting, but the title didn't match the experience I had playing the game." And this was more feedback than people would give me previously. People would just be like, "I hate the name. It's pretentious." And I was like, "I can't do anything with that. You know, you're not you're not actually helping me solve the problem." Whereas here was someone who actually wanted to know more. But I had bigger fish to fry at that stage because I was in the IGF and if this was going to be when I was going to get all of the interest, this was going to make me the same as those games from 2008. And I thought, "My game is so new over. I've got such a good chance of winning this thing and I didn't win. And this was the last time that I was going to let myself get burned by these expectations. I was not going to set any expectations from that moment on. And I

also didn't get any explosion in interest because I thought just being in the IGF would be enough. And so I didn't contact anyone. I didn't contact any press. And I got some coverage on the show floor, but I certainly didn't get as much coverage as some of the other games that were around. And I thought what makes me different to the people who, you know, what makes me different to the people from 2008 and 2009 that I that I knew about? And then I started thinking actually what happened to all of the other people who also got forgotten in the IGF? What what what didn't they do? And also what happened to all of the people who never went through festivals but still had successes and still had failures. And this taught me that just looking at the successful people was making me miss out on half of the story. I was having some more signs of progress though. Now at the IGF pavilion where there was lots of interesting stuff around people were sitting and playing my game for an average of 40 to 90 minutes which was a very good sign and I was also trying to negotiate console versions with Sony and Microsoft and so I thought this is going to take at least another 6 months and then this started

to come up more and more and more and these were people that I respected greatly who were wanting to help me solve this problem and understand why it was going to be such an issue. So Jonathan was looking at it and he was saying, "I understand how you ended up here. I understand that that the theme has helped you work out what you're actually creating, but this is a game that I think a lot of people are really going to want to play and you need to make sure that you get your first impressions right." And not only is Hazard not the right name, it's actually a counterproductive name because it makes it sound like it's in the same vein as games like Killzone and Bullet Storm. And not only are you not going to be able to compete on marketing budgets with those games, but that's not even the audience that you want. and the subtitle of journey of life. Obviously, there's problems there. So, this is why you need to change this. And I said, well, I can't change it now because like now I've got all of this exposure and I've just been through the IGF. Like, that seems super risky. Like, how am I going to build up all that exposure again? And he said, I know it seems like you have a whole lot of interest in this game right now, but that's going to be completely insignificant relative to the amount of interest that you could get if

you get all of these decisions right. So this was a massive leap of faith and it took a number of weeks of dealing with these guys to decide to rename the game to anti-chamber. And when I said this either in text or in speech, it brought all the right connotations to mind immediately. People thought inverse chamber against chamber and entrance to a larger space. This was exactly what I needed. And I thought, if I'm going to pull this off, I need something big. And fortunately for me, I got into the PAX 10. So, I announced the I announced the name change immediately after I got that notification ahead of when they were going to when they were going to announce the finalists and only one site posted about it. And I'm pretty sure that only Joystick did this because I'd met Alexander Sloinsky at DICE and he thought I was interesting and he wanted to help me out. And this taught me that what's big news to you may be nothing to someone else. If I was going to get people to care, I needed to needed to go into overdrive on this thing. So, I submitted footage to Indie Game the Movie. I backed their Kickstarter for $300 on the off chance that that went off and became a big success. I got into

Indicade. I went through a couple of Australian festivals again and I started sending the game off to festivals all around the world and um art galleries and schools so that anyone who wanted the game could just take it and spread word of it. And as I'm running around doing all of this, I've got people saying, "Why are you trying so hard? Like, why didn't you just give up and move on to your next thing?" And I said, "I'm trying to get something up to the same quality as games like Braid and World of Goo." And they'd be like, "Well, that's a big call for an indie." And I said, "What are you talking about? Like, Braid and World of Goo were both independent games. They were both made by two people." And they'd be like, "Well, yeah, but those guys had experience." And I said, "Ron and Kyle have their set of experiences that helped make that specific game. Jonathan had his experiences. I have my experience as an introspective psychological person. This is what I'm funneling into the game." And they'd be like, "Well, yeah, but those games cost hundreds of thousands of dollars." And I'm like, "If you cost my game effectively, my game also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have just solved that problem in another way." And

I realized that the answer to what makes me different by this stage was actually nothing. But I only understood this having gone through doing the same thing as all of these other people. And then I realized there's actually another question that I need here, which is how do I not mess this up? Half of my success was finding out what it took to be successful. The other half was not making mistakes. And one of those would have been the name because it's the first impressions that people see. The other one would have been if I continued chasing up consoles because these were taking up a hell of a lot of time and that was time that was being taken away from the design. So I didn't follow up with Microsoft and I was in negotiations with Sony for a long time and they did offer me a large sum of money at one stage. But I thought a worse game on more consoles is not a net benefit to anyone. This is such a risk for a design. I need the best game on the platform. It fits most. It fits for Steam. That's the audience I knew. And I also thought when I'd made that decision, I don't even own a PS3 or an Xbox 360. So why the hell am I trying to make something from a market I don't understand? So then I went off to the PAX 10 and I'd learned a hell of a lot from the IGF.

This time I went in with no expectations. Honestly, I thought Fez was going to get all of the attention or Jamestown or something else. I just wanted to have a good show. I knew how hard it was to get attention by this stage. And then this happened. Steven Tatillo from Kotaku said, "My favorite game of packs." Griffin Mroy wrote the best preview of the game. Ryan Davis from Giant Bomb uh covered the whole pack 10 and the comments started going crazy about my game. G4 TV and Machinima also picked it as like one of their favorite things of the show and I meant Notch and he also really enjoyed it. So, this was exactly the kind of reception I'd been chasing. And I responded to it with depression because now that I had all of these rising expectations, I thought, "My game is still months away from being done. And now I have to actually live up to all of these people that are excited about this thing." And I was running out of shows and I was running out of money. So, I thought, I have to get this thing finished. So, I'm going to give myself IGF 2012 as a deadline for this and then I'm just going to release it. And then I got nominated again for the technical

excellence category. And this time I'd learned from all of my mistakes from the IGF. I'd learned from my mistakes from the PAX 10 as well. And one of the things I'd noticed at the PAX 10 is that there was a lot of shaky cam footage of the game because I didn't actually release any new footage of the game after I announced the name change. I just released teaser screenshots. So I thought, all right, I will need good solid footage that I've made that really shows off the game for the IGF for PAX East. And in order to do this, I got help from other people who are experts at doing this. Kurt Gartner makes a bunch of independent trailers. And Antoine 40our CLA was someone that I'd met at PAX, who is the person who cuts the trailers for Assassin's Creed at Ubisoft. And this time when I sent this out to the press, it also came with a call to action. Come interview me at PAX. Come preview my game at PAX. Tell your readers that they can come find the game at at PAX East. And I picked a very quiet day to release this thing. And what happened was this saturated the news because I'd sent it to so many contacts who were now really interested in me. They all posted about it. And because they were all posting about it, a whole lot of other news sites just started catching wind of it and posting

about it as well. And then Notch retweeted it, Epic posted about it, a whole lot of other people with with a reach way larger than me were also posting about it. So going into the IGF again, no expectations of anything. I thought Fez was going to win the award for technical excellence and then I won the award for technical excellence which was an absolute shock and I also signed with the Indie Fund at this stage. And at this stage, I wasn't seeing any issues in the game anymore. And I also had some really good coverage. And this wasn't just because the game was better. This wasn't just because I won. This was because I had done a hell of a lot more work in the months leading up to this to try and get all of this attention. And I responded to this after the show by making statements like this. My game still isn't done. I feel worse than I've ever felt. I don't have anything to work towards now. They took away my goal. This doesn't sound like

someone who just received an award they'd been chasing for 3 years. This sounds like someone who's having a mental breakdown. And at this stage, I couldn't quit because that would have been a waste of several years of my life. And I couldn't release an unfinished game because that definitely wouldn't have lived up to the expectations that I'd built. Now, fortunately, Indie Game the movie came out and it was very reassuring that other people were going through this as well. Now, I know that this movie got a hell of a lot of criticism because people were like, "Making games isn't like that. Making games is fun." I'm watching these people struggle and I'm watching this, you know, watching Phil Fish have a terrible PAX East. I'm thinking I'm showing at Paxis for the first booth that I've actually paid for in 3 weeks. By 220 by 2012, I knew what I was doing and things just started to snowball. So, I was just trying desperately to finish this game and I was starting to become very jealous of all of these other games that were releasing and I was thinking, "Oh, what makes me different?" Obviously, it's that they could finish

their games and I couldn't at this stage. But I was also getting very paranoid about failure because some of the other people that had been through these festivals and come up alongside me released their games and they had very quiet launches and they just went away. And I thought, how do I make sure that that doesn't happen to me? So I thought, I have to give myself Pax East and PAX Prime will definitely be my last show. And YouTube streamers were becoming more and more of a big deal throughout 2011 2012. And in the leadup to PAX Prime, I see this tweet from Total Biscuit Go Out that says, "For your information, we're almost booked out of slots for PAX. So if you want to get your game looked at, contact this PR company." So straight away, I jumped on it and I recorded a really good video with Total Biscuit. And after we've stopped recording, I thought, "This is the best possible marketing material that I could make. It's the experience that people had had at shows. It's someone playing the game for the first time, giving their impressions, and then I can step in and keep giving a whole lot of the really interesting um background information and talk about

psychology and puzzle design, etc. And so I said to him, "When are you going to release these videos?" And he said, "We're going to release these as a PAX roundup in the weeks after PAX." And I thought, "That could be a bit of a problem because my game is still like a couple of months away." And he's like, "No, no, don't worry about it. We'll we'll talk about your game again when it releases." And I'm like, "Okay." So then I run around the Indie Mega booth where I was showing the game and I talk with as many developers as I can and I'm like, "I just made this fantastic video with Total Biscuit." And they're like, "Oh, awesome. The day that he released his video of our game was one of our biggest spikes in sales." And I'm like, "Oh, This is going to be such a mistake if this video goes out months before my game is released. People are just going to forget about it." So I sent him an email describing all of this. And I said, "My game is so hard to explain. We've just made the best marketing material. All these other people said this was always their biggest spike in sales. can you please hold this until the day that I release? And he said, "We wouldn't normally do it for people, but we understand your problem. We agree it was a good video, so we'll hold it off for you." So, this was like I was then aiming for October. I'd missed October. I knew that

December was totally out cuz that's when the summer sales were probably going to happen and they were black hole if you're not in them. So, I was like, "All right, I have to release in November, I guess, cuz this had to come out in 2012." And so, I spoke with my contact at Valve and I said, "What are good dates in November?" and he said, "The week of the 5th, the 14th, and the 28th of November look really good." And so when I spoke with the Indie Fund about this, one of them said, "Well, Halo comes out on the second, and you know, it's a console game, but you know, you just want to be aware of that." And so then I looked at the other dates, and the 14th was after Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed was right Assassin's Creed was right near the 28th. And I thought, this is also going to be such a problem. And yes, I'm just some indie game and I'm not competing directly with those guys. But I'm ulti ultimately going to be competing for media attention. And if I release my game in amongst when everyone else is just talking about Halo and Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, I will have spent years and then just throw it all away at the last minute. And at this stage, I did not trust any of my own decision-m

so I just spoke with the indie fund and I said, "Can you please just tell me what I should do?" And this was the feedback I got. Nathan Bella said, "Wait until late January or early February. you'll make more revenue releasing at a good time than you will lose via the delay. Ron Carmel said, "Dlaying will also give you time to plan and execute a launch PR plan." Aaron Isacson said, "You've spent so many years on this. I think you want to give people some time to get ready for its final release." And Kelly Santiago said, "Journey was on a similar schedule, and I think we really benefited from the added time to do a proper PR leader." So, here was my answer. This was why I wanted these guys to be invested in the game. If for nothing else, if not for the funding, these were very smart people who had been through all of this before, who could give me feed feedback like this at a time when I needed it most. And it was absolutely vital. So I took all of January 2013 to work on assets, the trailer, work out the pricing, release dates, etc. And I wanted to leave none of this to chance. I'm talking with developer friends. I'm talking with press friends. I'm talking with QA friends, trying to leave nothing about this release to chance. And I was carefully coordinating release coverage

with as many people as I could. I asked a friend from Polygon. I said, rather than relying on what Valve had said, I asked a friend from Polygon, I said, "Can you tell me when the release calendar is just dead?" And he did this for me because he was a friend and someone that I knew. And he said, "The middle of January and the end of January look pretty dead at the moment." So I thought, "This is fantastic." I wanted to announce two weeks before anyway. So, I'm going going to announce in the middle of January when nothing else is around and then I'm going to release at the end of January, which meant that when I announced my release date that was able to saturate the news and that was all leading up to this on the 30th of January, I released my anti-chamber launch trailer. And I did this a day ahead of time because I thought on the launch day, I'm going to have enough other coverage. I'm probably going to have some YouTube streamers. I'm going to have the Total Biscuit video. I'm going to get all of the um the views and stuff. So, I thought I'll release this a day early just to start winding up the hype hype cycle again. And because that went up and because my Steam page went up, Giant Bomb posted their Quicklook

video. And because they posted that, Total Biscuit sent me an email saying, "Why is one of my competitors posting a video?" And I'm like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Like, I've messed up." He's like, "It's not your fault. You're not meant to know that, but I'm sorry. I have to release this right now if you want to get the views that you deserve." And this, in hindsight, ended up being a fantastic decision because this was 14 hours before the game released. And no one could step in at this stage and be like, "Nah, you know, I played it. It wasn't very good. You know, there were gonna be critics." And so that was 14 hours of the YouTube comments going absolutely crazy about this. And I was sending off keys to everyone. I sent like 40 keys to Mojang. I sent off keys to Penny Arcade, just as many people as I could. And then Notch was posting about it a lot. And because of all of that, on January 31st, when I finally released, within the first hour, I was number one. Within 24 hours, I'd passed 25,000 sales. I had over 40 reviews from eight and nine, some low ones, but I can't control that. I got lots of high-profile YouTube coverage and non non-stop Twitter discussion all week. At this stage, the game just was

completely out of my hands and it just absolutely absolutely ran off. So, let's get to some takeaways. Number one, none of this happened quickly. This slide was 9 years of decision-m, seven years of work, three years of obsession for one day. And if you just look at this one day or when I won the IGF or when an announcement was made, you're missing out on two and a half thousand other days that led to this thing. And I talk about this because all throughout the development I would bang on about luck versus opportunity. This whole presentation is opportunity, opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And from the outside, people are looking in saying very, very lucky. And the reason that I'm talking about this is an example is the total biscuit video that goes up. People look at that and they're like, "Oh, you're lucky that that you know you got that Total Biscuit video." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? That was work. You know, that was 3 months earlier when I made this video and when I decided to, you know, get him to hold it off." And the concession here is that there was a little element of luck here. I could have been watching

Total Biscuit's tweet uh tweet stream 24/7. And if this tweet doesn't go out, absolutely, the rest of the story, as I've just described, it does not happen. But here's why that is completely irrelevant. This tweet is a very insignificant thing. And these kinds of things, these tweets, these random conversations that we have with people are going by a thousand times a day, every single day. That tweet went out to 250,000 people. That's how many followers he had at the time, minus retweets. Of those 250,000 people, a smaller subset were developers. A smaller subset were going to pack. A smaller subset had something ready to show. A smaller subset contacted him. A smaller subset recorded a video. And a smaller subset recorded a very good video. And another tweet from Total Biscuit several months later said, "Actually, most of the developer commentary videos that we record at shows like these, I I received very very negatively because either the developers don't know how to talk about their game or there's shaky cam footage or people would just rather hear Total Biscuit talk." He said, "Except for the anti-chamber video and another video." And it's not luck that I happen to record a good video with Total Biscuit

because prior to making that video, I had done nothing other than talk about my game for three years to work out how to talk about it most effectively. And the other reason I'm talking about this is because luck and opportunity are talking about exactly the same thing. Opportunity is future focused. These things can happen. Luck is always in hindsight. These things did happen. Once something happens, you don't need to continue looking for it again. Which is why I talk about development philosophy so much. What I did is not actually the important part of the story. It's why I made all of these decisions. All of the strategy that went into it, looking at other successes and trying to analyze what all of them did so that I could work out what were the right decisions for my specific game. And doing this requires brutal self-awareness. The reason that I was destroying myself doing this is because I was taking this to the absolute extreme. I did not care about my health. All I cared about was this game. And doing this brutal self-awareness means that you have to constantly question all of your assumptions and course correct

all along the way. It's not that I didn't make mistakes. It's that I made a thousand mistakes, learned from all of them, picked myself up, and then corrected them before it was too late. And the other takeaway that I don't talk about much, that I didn't talk about much at all throughout the development is that none of this happened in isolation. I understand spin. I understand talking with the press. And so it was a really good story to say I'm the guy. Me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me. All of these decisions, the successes and the failures, they're all on me. The reality is although I would have done around 80 to 90% of the development, I absolutely could not have had the success without the sound design, the composition, the modeling, the illustration, and all the other people helping me with business acumen and PR and strategy and testing. Hundreds, if not thousands of other people were necessary to make this success happen. I did not make it in a bubble. And finally, making games is hard. I don't look at any of this stuff. I don't look at independent development through rosecolored glasses. This was honestly the hardest thing that I've ever done. And it absolutely destroyed me. And the reason that I wanted to give this talk is so that people could see

that yes, this is very hard. And if you're struggling, that's what it takes sometimes. There's a lot of people who are struggling about this in private. I don't actually care about my public perception because my public perception was being open and candid about all of this stuff the whole time. So, I hope this talk has been inspiring. And if this all seems like something that you don't want to do, then I hope I've helped you make that decision as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So that was process and I know that a number of you probably don't have main conference passes. If any of you do tomorrow I'm presenting the other half of this which is what I was actually

doing with the design throughout all of those three years. So if you do have a main conference pass you can come and see that tomorrow and we're very early but I needed more than 25 minutes. So thank you. And if there are any questions, I don't know if we're taking them or going off in the ready room. Matt, I can take some questions. Cool. Hey, Alexander. Hey, Alexander. Over here to your right. Um, so you talked an awful lot and it was really awesome about how your personality and your PR strategy and your iterations uh led to the success of your game. You only talked a little bit about how the nature of your game itself led to the success of the game. Is there anything that you would sort of like in high concept add that like on that point basically? Um yes this is this is what this this next talk is about. There was there was way too much to talk about today. So I had a lot of people who like with the luck thing would be looking at my game as I'm talking about chasing opportunities as I'm talking about going through festivals and stuff and they'd

be like well yeah but come on you just had a good game. But actually back in 2009, I didn't have a really good game. A lot of the feedback that I was getting on that version, it it worked as a mod. It worked as a free mod and it worked for things like Make Something Unreal and it worked for things like Sense of One Night, which were looking for these really abstract unconventional things. But when I decided to take that and turn it into a standalone thing, the the feedback that I got from absolutely everyone was like, I'm always lost. There's too many dead ends. I don't know where to go. Puzzles should flash red if I can't do them. you know, the whole game should be restructured. And I had people asking this question when I'm trying to solve some of this stuff. They'd be like, "Yeah, but well, do you want to make something new or do you want to make something that can sell?" And I was like, "No, I actually want both." And so, by going through things like E3 and watching people play the game, I was able to identify all of the issues that were coming up and that were problems and then just be spot fixing them all. And then I'd put it in front of people again and I'd watch all of those things. I'd see what they thought was interesting. I'd remove the

parts they thought were uninteresting. And part of my talk tomorrow is about designing this balance between making something remarkable and making something commercial. And ultimately, one of the takeaways there is that the further you decide to go in the remarkable direction away from what the industry supports, the more work you have to do to bring it back and make people understand why they should care about this thing, which is a lot of work. But the flip side of that is that it's also a lot of work to start with something that you think will be commercial because you're attacking a market that already exists. Now you need to do all of the work of proving why people should care about your game more than some of these other games that have bigger marketing budgets that have executed things better that are sequels to you know things like that. And so so for me it made sense to try and just push in this remarkable direction and then work out what I what I had to do there. And I was doing it I I brought up examples of Braden World of Goo and Portal. And I did that because they were also games that happened to meet these balance and I wanted to understand not just what the games did but what led them to making all of those decisions and and do the same thing. That was

great man. Thanks. Thank you. Go ahead. Uh was it worth it? Honestly, for a long time the answer to that question was I'm not so sure. Um, I posted about how much of a success this thing was. And one of the fastest lessons that you learn is that having a large bank account does absolutely nothing to solve a lot of your problems. And in fact, it just gives you a hell of a lot more problems. It it affected relationships with a bunch of people. Um, I was obviously going through some pretty big mental issues going through all of this. And then when I'm talking with people, if I'm at the kind of person that's always very candid and honest about my problems and suddenly my problems revol revolve around money, then you start getting people being like, "Man, I wish I had your problems." And I'd be like, "Really?" Like, you want to be completely physically sick and have mental health issues and be screaming at yourself in the mirror and, you know, up your relationship with

people? I don't know why the hell you would want that. But, you know, that the fault isn't on them on them for that. Obviously they can't understand these circumstances and so what I decided to do having gone through all of this and having struggled through this the answer now is obviously it took a long time but I am now in a much better position. I am in the position I wanted to be be in when I decided to do this. But now when other people are releasing their games or when they do have these big successes, I'm there one to try and talk to them and help them out and say this is this is what the future could be like for you so they don't have to go through the same problems I did. Thanks for all your honesty. Um how did how did me in the middle here? Um how did you support yourself financially while doing this? So, I went into this with $17,000 in savings and I had that all of this is like 5year plan stuff. So, when I was working in industry, I was just in like a junior, an intern, whatever. And I was on like a

$28,000 salary. And some of that would have gone into tax and then I would have only spent about a couple of thousand throughout that year thinking I don't need any of this now and I'm not very materialistic. So, I'm just going to put all of this in the bank for if I happen to need it one day. So when I needed to go to things like Sense of Wonder Night, I just had this $17,000 there that I could use. And then when I got the money for Make Something Unreal, I gave me another $25,000 so I could continue extending things out. And then as I continued going through these competitions, some of them came with money, but most of them came with like free booth space. So I was never paying for most of my booths around all of this. And being from Australia, there was also some government grants, which weren't for like outright funding. There were things like if you go to an event and you need to recoup some of your expenses, you can get a grant that will recoup like $25,000. So, for example, when I went to the PAX 10 in 2011, I was actually really out of money at that stage. But going to that, it cost me $25,000. Sorry, it cost me $2,200 in flights and

I spent $300 while I was there. But I stayed with friends. I always stayed with friends when I was traveling because that means I don't have to pay for accommodation and I didn't have to pay for my booth because it was covered by packs which meant that I was able to then go to the government and recoup $25,000 in expenses which happened to make that whole trip just completely free. So I was being as frugal as I could. I was also living at home with parents which kept my burn rate very low. And I understand that you know not everyone is in that position but honestly funding is one of the most solved problems in independent development. can go to publishers, you can get Kickstarter, there is government grants, there is, you know, private private funding, there's pre-orders, etc. So, if people look at funding and say, "Oh, but you just lived with parents." That was an active decision on my behalf to stay doing that to keep my burn rate very low. Thank you much. Um, so my question is, uh, you talk about how, um, a lot of the promotion and like meeting people, you had to go to all these conferences, um, and

festivals and everything. I wanted to know how you were able to structure your uh development cycle around that so that it didn't really mess with um you know you didn't go away for a week and come back and that didn't really disrupt you. So the thing that festivals were solving is when I was just in alone in my bedroom that's actually when things were the most difficult and every time I went off to a festival I would be completely refreshed and I was still working the whole time. I was networking. I was doing business. I was um testing the game constantly. And that was the most valuable work that I did. And it's also what refreshed my mental state. So that then I could come back and work on the problems that were real problems. You know, after a couple of months, you start thinking these are the most significant problems. I really need to fix these things. You'd go to a festival and realize actually none of that work matters. No one cares about any of that stuff. And so it was also making me much more efficient because it stopped me working on things that just didn't matter in the long run. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I'm not sure if you can talk about them or to the extent you can talk about

them, but from someone who went through a seven-year development cycle and had so many problems and went through so much, where do you I'm just curious where do you go from here? You know, is it is it difficult to like think about having another seven-year development cycle or have another game that you know is that difficult? What What do you What's your thoughts? Now, this this is part of why some of this was was problematic. You know, after releasing this, a whole lot of people are like, "Oh, man. What are you going to work on next?" And I'm like, if this is how I feel after the one that just pulled off absolutely everything, I don't want to do this again. You know, that. And so, um, that lost all of my creative drive. And if I was also doing this for the career drive and for like the financial side and I've just solved that I lost all of my financial drive as well, which means that you've taken a very driven person and you've removed any reason for them to to have drive. And honestly, that just took a whole lot of time. It, you know, would have taken 8 months before I started becoming interested in anything again. And that was something that I couldn't

force. I can't intensely problem solve being interested about the world. I just have to, you know, I I just had to live more existentially dayto-day and just find other things that would interest me. Thank you. You're welcome. Uh, hey, Alex. Um, I'm Hamish. Um, my question is, what, and you might be addressing this tomorrow, but I feel like I have to know now. What percentage of your um development time were you were you spending on this kind of stuff on marketing basically and marketing and testing? So, I would have gone just marketing. They were kind of the same like going to events was was testing. Oh, yeah. As well. So, on on marketing and stuff. So, it was primarily through events. So, I went through like 15 to 20 events before I'd released the um game. And that those things are only very short bursts. Maybe they're three days, maybe they're a week. And then between all of those, I was just straight back on the development. And as I was um submitting uh builds to festivals, then I would have to do a little bit more work then on like um information about the game

and I'd have to be sending out press releases and stuff, but those were all like, you know, days here and there. And most of them were just talking with people that I'd already met around the place. You know, some like I had a lot of um I met a lot of people in the press and so I could just have a lot of candid conversations off the record on things like Facebook with those people to work out what I was doing and so it was then much faster to work out what kinds of assets I need and taking things like Ramy's you know do press kit I don't have to work out what a good press kit looks like I just take that and you know fill that out. So, it was a long time because of all the investment into festivals, but most of the development while I was at home was just pure development. Thanks very much. And by the way, your game was really, really good in 2009. Thank you. That's it. Thank you guys.