"Slowly but surely, as I continued working on the game, more and more people jumped on board and started getting excited about it, which helped me continue pushing the bar higher," Bruce said. To resolve the disparities between these two camps, Bruce brought the game to shows again and again, streamlining its design based directly on player reaction. Bruce also saw a handful of players who got it right away, and they became immediate, strong advocates for Antichamber. There, he watched people step up to Antichamber, play for a few minutes and then walk away, most frustrated that they didn't understand the game.
He took Antichamber to numerous gaming conventions, starting with the first playable showcase at the 2010 IndieCade booth at E3. To find this balance of mysterious rightness that was crucial to Antichamber's success, Bruce focused on getting the game into as many people's hands – and minds – as possible. It was either done right and people couldn't pin down why it worked, or it wasn't right and unraveled very quickly." "The reason this stuff was always so frustrating is that it's impossible to put a timeline on something as experimental as Antichamber was. That you could have made some money off it already and could be working on your next game, and that everything was diminishing returns," Bruce said, describing the most obnoxious aspect of a multi-year, pre-launch spotlight. "Having people tell you, for several years, that you were taking too long and that you should have got it out the door sooner. With a premise like that and poppy visuals to match, Antichamber drummed up a substantial amount of pre-launch publicity over the years for an experimental indie game, this situation should have been ideal – but it came with a downside. Luckily for Bruce, Antichamber's main goal was to blow your mind, break boundaries and push the limits of puzzle gaming. If you thought "everything" sounded like an insane, illogical amount of content to throw into one game, you'd be right. "Pretty much everything I've ever made somehow found its way into the final version of Antichamber," Bruce told me.
More notable, however, was that Antichamber launched on Steam yesterday, January 31, 2013, and quickly claimed the No.
In the years following Sense of Wonder Night 2009, Bruce's updated, full-game version of Hazard – now called Antichamber– won more than 20 honors, including the award for Technical Excellence at the Independent Games Festival 2012. It was his first official recognition as a developer and Hazard was still a hobby project, something Bruce had worked on in his spare time over the previous six months, based off prototypes he'd messed around with since 2006. In 2009, Alexander Bruce took a week off from his university studies in Australia to fly to Tokyo and present his Unreal Tournament 3 mod, Hazard: The Journey of Life, at Tokyo Game Show's experimental games summit, Sense of Wonder Night.
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