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Interview
Zeno Clash
29.03.2009 | 00:00 Uhr | von ultio
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The Indie developer ACE Team is going to release its first game on the 21 of April: Zeno Clash. The crazy fantasy punk game uses Valve's Source Engine, including Steam Cloud and achievments. We had the opportunity to ask one of the developers, Edmundo Bordeu, a few questions.
First of all, why don't you introduce yourself and your studio?
- Hi, my name is Edmundo Bordeu, and I am one of the founders of ACE Team and art director of Zeno Clash.
Our studio was first a mod development team before becoming a professional development studio. Some of our members also worked at Wanako Games, another Chilean compan, but we eventually decided we wanted to create an independent studio of our own and decided to take our mod name to found the studio. Among the founders were the original mod team members and brothers: Andres, Carlos and myself, we were also lucky to start with our very talented programmer David Caloguerea.
So ACE Team goes way back to probably the mid 90’s, but we did not begin as a real company until recently. Now we have a core team of 7 people. When did you first come up with the idea of Zeno Clash and how long did the development of the game take?
- Zeno Clash was born after a game prototype that we built many years ago using Lithtech’s Jupiter System (engine used for Monolith’s No One Lives Forever 2). The game was called Zenozoik and it shared many similarities with Zeno Clash. That first demo had too many features and lacked a solid core design for both art and gameplay mechanics, so this prototype was a great experience and it helped us greatly because we could look back and start work on Zeno Clash analyzing what we had done well and what we had to improve or re-work to do a more solid game. Zeno Clash has been in development for about two years.
Why did you choose the Source Engine for your game and why did you choose Steam as distribution way?
- The Source Engine is a robust engine and it has a lot of features that where important for the development of Zeno Clash, there is abundant information about it, and very good support from the guys at Valve and other people using it. I think that when we started the tool that impressed me the most was the animation and facial animation tools which are really good. Another good thing is that during the life of our project the Source engine has had many updates like HDR, motion blur, a new particle system and so on, so we have been able to benefit from these updates too.
About why we chose distribution on Steam, I think it was definitely the way to go for us: it has 20 million users, it gives us the possibility to sell the game at whatever price we choose, it gives us the ability to deliver updates very easily, we can also use Steam cloud so the players can save their information...
And it is not just distribution; in the challenge mode we have in Zeno Clash, you can compete against the scores of your friends or groups from Steam. Having this big network of players can make the game more fun. Could you tell us something about the games crazy style? It looks like a really fresh idea.
- The first inspiration was a set of game books of the 1980’s; the Sorcery series from Steve Jackson, mainly because of John Blanche’s art. But we have also drawn inspiration from a lot of other sources like the art of Hieronymus Bosch, surrealism, The Dark Crystal film...
For Zeno Clash we wanted to create a truly unique fantasy game. Fantasy can be something else than orcs, dragons and mages. Actually the term “punk fantasy” (which had a very big influence on all the art direction, and even on the story) is not something new, it exists since the 80s, but nowdays what we see a lot is almost its opposite: “epic fantasy” which insists on grandiose themes or on “The battle of good against evil”. Through the art direction we tried to deviate from this trend. On the next page you'll find information about a European retail version an if the German version will be censored.
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