Hi! My name is Alexandre Richer, but most people call me Alex. My pronouns are he/him/his. I am a father of a wonderful son who is critically-ill since birth with a rare syndrome. You can read more about this on my wife's blog at www.adam-richer.com.

My passion when I was young was movies and computers. So, I initially wanted to create films. Yet, I've been in the video gaming industry for roughly 15 years first as a game developer, and eventually as a leader. When you think about it, video games are the new cinema. So, this isn't lost by any means. Overall, I accumulated over 20 years in the computer science field, and I'm continuing to push my interests in learning more about video game development in general, pushing my leadership and people management skills, while dabbing at times in network security, software, hardware, domotic, cinema and more.

I officially started my career in IT in 1999 developing web sites. This was right after developing the first ever web site for my high school back at La Magdeleine. I worked the whole summer for the La Prairie Historical Society developing their first web site using HTML and Flash technologies, improvising myself at time a Photoshop artist, which I was not.

Having a clear passion for technologies, I went to study at Champlain College in St-Lambert, finishing with a Programming Computer Science degree (420.01). Lots of those courses covered programming languages intensively, such as C, C++, Java, Cobol, JCL, VC++ with MFCs, VB, and much more. Even though I enjoyed programming, I always loved to invest lots of efforts and energy onto my software user interfaces. I would end up spending the majority of my time making it look neat, effective and intuitive. I clearly had a passion for UI and UX without realizing it. Mind you, I never studied in UI directly. It was all acquired through learning, experience and common sense when making interfaces.

Fast-forward to 2002 when I finished school and started working as a consultant at CGI offering various technical services for their main customer: Bell Canada. My job included various tasks, such as developing and maintaining a software troubleshooting Sympatico's High Speed Internet issues. This one was in Java Servlets, so my web experience, UI and UX passion paid off. Later, I also developed a software allowing a quick fix without any effort for FWFM technicians. Whenever issues arise on their route, the regular troubleshooting steps can take as much as 30 minutes or more, depending on how tech-savvy the technician was. This software essentially resolved the issue in a one-click solution. Eventually, I acted as senior to support the team regarding most technical issues. Enjoying challenges, I had a friend who worked at a pharmacy and told me about an opening on the P.O.S. team. This was also the last time I ever had to look for work myself.

So, here we were in 2005 when I did the switch and moved to work for a local pharmacy company quite popular in Quebec called Jean Coutu. Working mostly for their technical center, called the Rx Center, I developed their P.O.S. (Point of Sale) systems, including cashiers, price checker, inventory management, etc. It was an overall nice challenge developing systems in C under Unix when I had never touched such systems before. Even though most user interfaces were rudimentary, done in ASCII art back then, I had lots of fun making unique, yet intuitive and professional-looking user interfaces for our small user base. It was overall limited in functionalities compared to today's standards, but even then, it was fun and I gave me a hunch UI would be something I would enjoy later on, which turned out to be the case, but applied to the video game industry.

Around 2007, I was approached by old coworkers from back in the days at CGI now working at a small company in the Old Montreal called Bluestreak. This company was developing a Flash player for the mobile industry, before the era of the iPhone. I was taking care of the Mobile TV application, leading me to travel to get the software ready to distribute it through our partners. The team was small, yet energetic and I learned a lot from them.

At that time, the video game industry in Montreal was exploding and it felt new studios were created every few weeks. I took an opportunity to join the rank of a new studio called Eidos Montreal. Through an ever expanding love and passion in developing User Interfaces, I started my career at Eidos as their first UI programmer working on a classic game I had played back in 2000: Deus Ex! The project would be known as the third installment in the series, which was officially known as Deux Ex: Human Revolution. I developed a lot of the UI in that game along with a few solid coworkers. It was my first production from start to finish and it was quite a learning opportunity. I got to work with talented and passionate coworkers who all wanted to bring back Deus Ex for the newest generations to discover. Along that journey, I eventually helped Crystal Dynamic remotely from Montreal on their upcoming installment of Tomb Raider before getting back on our original Deus Ex franchise. I started working on the fourth installment redoing the UI architecture from the ground up on a new game engine with the rest of team. Ubisoft was pretty active in my daily LinkedIn messages looking for talents to join
their Rainbow Six Siege teams. I didn't have much interest for this project
back then having heard rumors that it was a challenging project. If I only knew, it eventually became one of the most profitable recent Ubisoft game.

I've invested my efforts into making this new game as solid as ever. This new game turned out to be Deux Ex: Mankind Divided.

At that point, a cool E3 demo literally blew my mind away. It was the trailer of Watch_Dogs. This game concept was combining a lot of the elements I was hoping to do on a project: open world universe like GTA, hacking elements a la Deus Ex, an advanced and immersive UI, a big budget project, and lots of potential learning opportunities. This is when I decided to join the rank of Ubisoft Montreal to learn how they could build such an immersive and technologically-advanced user interface. Upon my arrival, I quickly realized there were no magic and there were still lots of challenge to be solved before the game would ship. Still, I took challenges in optimizing the full game's UI. See, the game was initially taking a big chunk of the whole CPU frame. The game had difficulties running on the newest PS4 and Xbox One, so you can imagine the challenge when they've asked me to make it run on the current-generation of consoles, which back then were the Xbox 360 and the PS3. With the help of a talented team, we were able to achieve the impossible... with hopes of minimizing the impacts of the player's journey and game quality.

This is also a time in my life where my son was born and life brought us many challenges to go through. Being fighters, I came back to work stronger than ever looking for new opportunities. I was offered leadership titles (programming technical lead and programming team lead) on various projects, which were all very interesting to me, but knowing I had a complicated family life, I couldn't see myself accepting such jobs without being able to fully dedicate myself. Yet, the challenge was tempting and after a while, I found a project that was willing to take me as-is and allow me to learn the ropes of becoming a leader. It was on Watch_Dogs 2 that I jumped on this opportunity becoming a team leader building one of my first and one of the best team I've ever had the chance to work with. Today, at the time of writing these lines, most of the team members have very successful careers at various studios around the world, and I'm very proud of them. They are a motivation for my every day work as a leader. And this is why I want to pursue a career in leadership. Fast-forward through Far Cry 5 for which I came to help with the Watch_Dogs UI team to ensure they shipped their game on time and in budget. Meanwhile, we took the big decision of splitting our Watch_Dogs UI team in half to start two projects: Watch_Dogs Legion and another cancelled project. I chose to start a new project instead of continuing on the Watch_Dogs franchise, mostly because it was moving to Toronto. Instead, I moved onto a massive project with a massive budget. The goal was to create one of the most innovating UI, very similar to what Destiny pulled off. The team was amazing, allowing us to move from an in-house Flash-based technology to a new UI middleware allowing artists full control over the view. This new paradigm brought so much promises, including flexibility of execution, complete separation between the code and the view (MVVM) and a great rapidity in delivering new in-game features. Sadly, the project was cancelled after nearly 3 years of development. This was the first time I experienced such a deception as I believe the project had great potential.

When the pandemic started, I wanted to work from home to ensure the health of my son. With my Ubisoft project being cancelled, I decided to join the rank of Square Enix Montreal, where I am now a development director leading a team of talented, efficient and ingenious engineers wanting to ship a great, innovative and fun game. Since this is an unannounced project, more details will unfold with time.

With the last years, I feel I've continued enriching my "Work From Home" leadership experience to eventually become a successful remote leader. I honestly think this is where the future of talent recruitment is headed for video game industry.