Our Origins: From Cipher to Signal

Before Alter Aspect had a name, it had a vocabulary. Hip-hop played through the house alongside videogames, anime, films and the visual noise of the late 90s and early 2000s. Baggy clothes were partly style and partly hand-me-down economics. Bedroom walls ended up covered in graffiti. Consoles changed every few years.

None of this looked like the foundations of a creative studio at the time.

It was simply the culture around us.

By the early 2000s, another layer was appearing. Graffiti was increasingly overlapping with stencil work, illustration, political imagery and the broader idea of street art. Banksy was becoming difficult to ignore in Britain, but the appeal went beyond one artist. There was something compelling about using the street as a medium: taking an image, symbol or idea out of its expected context and putting it somewhere people had no choice but to encounter it.

That instinct — to take something familiar, shift the angle and see what else it could become — would eventually sit near the centre of Alter Aspect.

Finding a Language

Art college gave those influences somewhere to go.

Graffiti and street art became things to experiment with rather than simply look at. Stencils were particularly appealing because they allowed an image to be controlled, repeated and layered without losing the immediacy of putting something into physical space. There was already an urge to make work that did something beyond decoration: an illusion, a hidden idea, an unusual combination or a visual trick that rewarded another look.

Personal style developed in much the same way.

Hip-hop remained an obvious influence, but skatewear, streetwear and increasingly eclectic references were mixing into it. Baggy jeans and oversized hoodies sat alongside chains, skate shoes, leather, denim and whatever strange combination happened to work. Music broadened. Games became more sophisticated. Anime, film, design and technology kept adding to the same pool.

None of it was organised into an aesthetic manifesto. It was experimentation.

University widened that experimentation considerably. Art and visual design now overlapped with animation, videogames and interactive media at almost exactly the moment the technology around us was changing how those mediums could meet.

Smartphones were becoming normal rather than novel. Cameras, music players, maps, communication and software were collapsing into the same device. Digital experiences were beginning to follow people away from the desktop. The distinction between something physical and something interactive was becoming less obvious.

A drawing could become an animation. An interface could become part of a game. A graphic could exist on a shirt, a screen or a sticker in the street.

The boundaries between mediums started feeling increasingly arbitrary.

That was roughly where the earliest commercial version of the studio began.

Online print-on-demand platforms suddenly made it possible to upload artwork and turn it into clothing or physical objects without manufacturing them ourselves. At the same time, technologies such as consumer 3D printing hinted at a much broader possibility: digital creators were gaining increasingly direct routes into the physical world.

The original impulse was simple: make things we would actually want to own and wear.

It did not quite work out that way.

Beyond the Image

Professional creative work gradually expanded the scale of the problem.

Working across design, games, UX and technology meant seeing creative decisions from very different positions. Some projects were primarily visual. Others involved complex interfaces, systems and teams spread across multiple disciplines.

UX was particularly influential because it forced a shift in thinking.

A screen cannot be judged only by how it looks. It exists within a sequence of decisions. Information has hierarchy. Actions have consequences. One element changes how another is understood. A good interface supports whatever somebody is actually trying to accomplish.

Design had become behavioural.

Games pushed that idea further.

A game is rules, information, art, sound, interaction, psychology and player choice working at once. Change one number and an entire strategy can emerge or collapse. Remove a mechanic and something seemingly unrelated may suddenly work better.

The interesting object was no longer always the individual asset.

It was the system connecting everything together.

Work also exposed us to radically different ways of organising creative people. We saw environments where pressure, hierarchy and poor communication made good work harder than it needed to be. We also saw teams where talented people with different specialisms could challenge one another, share knowledge and solve difficult problems together.

That experience quietly shaped our idea of what a studio should be.

The structure around creativity matters.

So does knowing what you are actually trying to build.

Games, Learning and a Problem Worth Solving

Work in AAA, indie and educational games brought several interests into conflict.

Regular games were engaging enough that people could spend hundreds or thousands of hours learning their mechanics, developing skills and understanding increasingly complicated systems. That was part of their strength, but as time became more valuable with age, the scale of that investment became harder to ignore.

Learning, meanwhile, can be enormously useful without always being enjoyable. There are subjects we genuinely want to understand and skills we know would improve our lives, yet the process of acquiring them can still feel slow, repetitive or disconnected from the reasons we wanted the knowledge in the first place.

Educational games seemed like an obvious bridge, yet many struggled to attract people who already loved games.

Too often the educational material felt like work with a game wrapped around it, while the game itself lacked the depth that makes somebody voluntarily lose an evening to one more turn, run or match.

There were already interesting examples sitting somewhere between those worlds.

Platforms such as Boot.dev use game-like progression to make the repetitive practice required for programming easier to sustain, while still asking users to write substantial amounts of actual code rather than replacing the skill with superficial rewards. Elsewhere, Steam is full of hacking simulators and programming-adjacent games that sit at different points on the blurred line between entertainment and skill-building.

Games can approach the problem from the opposite direction too: instead of explicitly trying to teach, they can immerse themselves deeply enough in an activity or subject that understanding emerges through play.

Keep Driving, for example, turns the practical clutter of a road trip — fuel, repairs, routes, odd jobs, limited space and getting stuck behind a tractor — into the material of an RPG. PowerWash Simulator takes an activity that would ordinarily qualify as a household chore and builds its appeal around the simple satisfaction, rhythm and progression of doing it well.

Neither needs to disguise its subject.

The subject becomes the game.

That distinction interested us because it suggested a different direction from the traditional educational-game model. Instead of asking how to hide learning behind rewards, what happens when the system itself is interesting enough to explore?

The wider games industry presented another contradiction.

AAA games can produce extraordinary work: huge collaborative projects capable of technical ambition, dense worlds and experiences that become part of wider culture. But the scale that enables those things can also bring layers of bureaucracy, commercial pressure and risk management. Sometimes graphics, monetisation or market expectations receive more attention than the underlying play.

Independent studios often occupy almost the inverse position. Smaller teams and individual developers have fewer resources, but that constraint can make experimentation easier. Strange mechanics, unusual subjects and ideas that would struggle to survive a large approval process can become the entire reason a project exists.

Some of those experiments eventually influence the rest of the medium.

Neither side contains a perfect answer.

What interested us was the territory between them: the craft and ambition possible in professional production, the creative freedom of smaller teams, and the possibility of building games with subject matter embedded deeply enough that playing and learning no longer feel like separate activities.

A question began forming that would return much later:

Could a game be genuinely useful without sacrificing the reasons people enjoy games in the first place?

Ideas That Had to Become Useful

Creative work does not develop separately from the rest of life.

Over the years there were new places, relationships, parenthood, loss, travel, mistakes, good decisions and bad ones. Some periods were productive. Others were not.

At one point, making things largely stopped.

That turned out to matter more than another design project probably would have.

For years we had collected philosophical ideas almost instinctively: quotes, principles, ways of looking at discipline, uncertainty, resilience, identity and change. They were interesting to read and useful to think about.

Then circumstances changed enough that some of them had to become useful in practice.

There is a difference between agreeing with an idea and needing it.

That period changed the relationship between Alter Aspect and philosophy. Philosophy stopped being something that could simply provide interesting imagery or language. The better question became whether an idea actually held up when applied to ordinary life.

Curiosity also shifted toward fields that initially seemed some distance from art and design: finance, trading, cryptocurrency, Web3, AI, virtual reality and the broader changes happening across technology.

The attraction was less about any one industry than the systems underneath them.

Markets brought ideas about probability, risk, psychology and decision-making under uncertainty. Decentralised technologies raised questions about ownership, trust and digital identity. AI changed what could be automated or created. VR continued pushing at the boundary between physical and digital experience.

Once again, seemingly unrelated subjects kept producing overlapping lessons.

Context changes meaning. Systems create behaviour. Information only becomes useful when someone can act on it.

The habit became increasingly familiar: learn something deeply enough to understand the structure underneath it, then ask where else that structure might be useful.

The Thread Reappears

Alter Aspect had been largely dormant through much of this period.

When it began moving again, it did not return in quite the same form.

The visual language had evolved. Street culture remained, but cyberpunk, Japanese design, retro technology, anime, games and years of other influences had accumulated around it. The identity was rebuilt. The original Penrose triangle eventually gave way to something new.

More importantly, the work itself was changing.

Our first serious studio game project grew from thinking about how learning could be made more engaging. A relatively simple concept began expanding as ideas from different parts of our experience started colliding.

Questions about learning became questions about mechanics. Financial systems suggested ways of thinking about risk and resource management. UX influenced how information should be presented. Previous experience with educational games sharpened the distinction between teaching something and making somebody want to engage with it.

One medium was borrowing from another.

That was when the broader shape of Alter Aspect finally began to make sense.

Not because we had discovered one thing we wanted to make, but because we stopped assuming that we needed to.

From Cipher to Signal

Describing Alter Aspect purely by its outputs can still make it sound scattered. Games sit beside software and systems; clothing and physical objects sit beside artwork and writing.

The connection appears when the medium is allowed to come second.

An idea might need explaining, so it becomes an article. Another works better visually. A problem may suggest a piece of software, while something built around decisions and consequences naturally belongs in a game. Occasionally an idea simply deserves to exist on a jacket.

That principle helped us look back at the studio's history differently too.

Street art taught us about placing ideas into the world. Illusion taught us to play with perception. UX introduced deeper systems thinking, while games demonstrated how those systems could create experiences rather than simply organise information. Philosophy supplied ideas worth testing. Technology kept expanding the number of ways those pieces could interact.

None of these influences arrived according to a plan, and for years their relationship remained difficult to articulate.

The pieces were there, but what was missing was the pattern.

Alter Aspect, Properly

The final shift was recognising that the idea did not need to belong to one person.

The modern company was formed by two people who had shared much of the same cultural background from the beginning, then followed different paths through design, technology and life before arriving at many of the same frustrations and possibilities.

When the newer version of Alter Aspect was finally laid out in full, it made sense to both of us.

So we built around it.

The company was formed. The website was rebuilt. Old projects were reconsidered and new ones began. Games moved from ideas into prototypes. Writing became a way to preserve the thinking behind the work rather than allowing it to disappear once the finished object existed.

There will be experiments that work and others that become folders of abandoned files, useful mainly because they taught us what not to build next. That is part of making things seriously enough to test them.

Looking back, there was no clean moment when Alter Aspect became what it is now. The influences arrived first. Skills followed. Experience changed what seemed important, and eventually enough distance existed to see connections that had been difficult to recognise from inside them.

The studio had spent years collecting fragments from culture, design, technology and life.

What changed was the perspective that connected them.

The cipher became a signal.

• Home

• Blog

• Store

• About

Subscribe to the Signal

Occasional news, articles and studio updates.

You can unsubscribe at any time. See our Privacy Policy.