BROKEN RULES

From broken furniture to a radical reorganisation: how the Gibbon developer has kept on swinging

- NIALL O'DONOGHUE

Development was already under way on Chasing Aurora, and Clemens Scott couldn't settle on an art style for Broken Rules' Wii U launch title. You could, perhaps, attribute this to second-game jitters, but for the fact that this was Scott's first project after joining the studio as art director. And nothing he was drawing seemed to fit the concept: a multiplayer action game about the dream of flight.

All it took was a particularly unproductive day while working from home, the door of an overstuffed wooden wardrobe constantly banging off his arm, for Scott to snap. "At some point, I burst and I just kicked that wardrobe," he laughs. "It fell apart. Everything started slanting slowly, and then collapsing."

Yet, among the fragments, something caught his eye: the shelves. With a background in analogue art, Scott turned the wood into a canvas, cross-hatching landscapes with a black marker. Over a decade later, he still remembers the reaction from his colleagues after bringing the decorated shelf into the office: "This is it".

That act of breaking down and rebuilding could serve as a metaphor for the way Broken Rules itself has changed over the years. Today, it operates as something closer to a creative hub than a traditional game studio. Based out of a shared office in Vienna's Museumsquartier alongside two other indie developers, an animator, and an architectural visualiser - its five co-founders work independently of each other, collaborating on certain projects and relying on external contractors for larger games. An atypical structure, for sure, but one that kept Broken Rules going when closure seemed all but inevitable.

Its origins can be traced to the Vienna University of Technology, where computer science students Peter Vorlaufer, Jan Hackl and Felix Bohatsch were part of a joint thesis project that grew into the puzzle platformer And Yet It Moves.