STUDIO PROFILE

BULKHEAD

Becoming ‘the next big shooter studio’, no matter what it takes

By Ed Smith

To get into the game industry – at least at the level he’d always dreamed of – Joe Brammer had to tell a lie. In 2014, just as he was about to graduate from university, he applied for what was then the brand-new ID@Xbox scheme, which enabled novice developers to pitch to Microsoft in the hope of receiving an Xbox One development kit and a subscription to Unreal Engine. “I’d wanted to make games since I was 11, modding Battlefield,” Brammer says. “So I lied on the form, saying I’d worked for loads of people, like Lionhead. It’s funny when you look at that list of the first ID@Xbox studios now: CryTek, Sumo Digital, me.”

Working with a team of friends from his course, Brammer would co-create a firstperson Myst-style puzzler called Pneuma: Breath Of Life. “If we launched it today, we’d get slaughtered,” he continues. “It’s awful. But it was the first Unreal Engine 4 game on Xbox One, so Epic put us in all their booths”. Helped along by that whirlwind exposure, the game made about £400,000 in its first six months, more than enough to get production going on a new project. It also incentivised the formal founding of Bulkhead as a studio.

From a variety of fleetingly occupied offices around Derby (“We’ve moved about ten times by now,” Brammer says), the expanded and newly rebranded team would go to work on its next game, a follow-up firstperson puzzler called, with an almost hubristic pragmatism, The Turing Test. Just like getting accepted into the ID@Xbox scheme, when it came to Bulkhead’s masthead debut, the ends were more important than the means, and what mattered above all was the will to get things done. “We basically made the whole game in white box, with about 100 puzzles,” Brammer recalls. “Then we went to a local college and we added a little popup at the end of each puzzle asking people to rate the difficulty and how much they enjoyed it. And then we put them in that order, on a spaceship. Honestly, it was easy.”