A Whole New World

You might expect ACE Team to work from some sort of colourful crazy house, the walls painted with vibrant, dreamlike murals.

They don’t. They work in a small, modest office in Santiago, Chile – an eight-strong independent studio who invested everything in their debut project, Zeno Clash. It’s a good job they did. The Source Engine-powered fighting game proved to be one of the most exciting and creative releases of 2009.

“It was born from an older project, which we started developing some years before ACE Team was formed as a professional studio,” explains Andres Bordeu, one of the company’s pair of lead designers. The other is his twin, Carlos, with a third brother, Edmundo, working as Art Director: the A., C. and E of the Team. “At that time, we were granted a demo license of the Lithtech Jupiter System – the same engine used by Monolith’s No One Lives Forever 2 – with which our team tried to create a game called Zenozoik. The goal of this project was to create an action RPG in first-person, but the prototype never took off, mainly because we tried to create something too ambitious for a small studio.”

How, then, did Zeno Clash’s wondrous world come into existence? Its vivid alien landscapes and outlandish character designs are a far cry from most of today’s mainstream releases. In Zeno Clash, the environment feels like part of an enormous, existing culture, of which we’re only seeing a tiny speck. In other words, Zenozoik must have been very ambitious indeed, because Zeno Clash is about as big and bold as indie games come.

“Many years after the development of the prototype, we gathered around our original concept and re-thought the game in a manner that it would focus on few but solid elements that we would be able to produce as a small team,” Andres Bordeu continues. “Our vision had to nail two key elements: the surreal, novel art style and the intense combat in first-person perspective. We needed to scrap all the RPG elements and scale down the game to something that would end up being like a fantasy Double Dragon shooter – a very unusual mix. We knew that we were too few to make a game with large, open and expansive environments, so scaling down the concept of the game was crucial.”

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
There was an era when wildly inventive world design ruled. Throughout the 90s, studios experimented with a variety of styles. As the new millennium rolled around, and with it advanced engine technology, these worlds began to shine in a way no one had ever thought possible. The rolling hills of Giants: Citizen Kabuto or the striking otherworldliness of Sacrifice impressed players around the world.

Of course, these games were never in the mainstream. But even iD Software’s early work on the Quake series, Naughty Dog’s insane Crash Bandicoot titles and the legendary Grim Fandango had wowed on a wider scale. Now, it seems as though this creativity is fading, making way for yet another science-fiction romp, or the gritty battlefields of a real-life war.

While Bordeu thinks more grounded, realistic world design can still feature great art, he has noticed a decline in novel videogame settings. “I think it has to do with the avoidance of risk,” he says. “Videogames are consistently getting bigger and more expensive to produce, so for a publisher to develop a title backed up by a known IP or traditional theme would seem the safest bet. Many of today’s games seem to look at competitive titles or related media – like blockbuster movies – when looking for sources of inspiration. You can tell that Star Wars, Alien and war-themed movies are a common source of inspiration for many shooters, or other games from different genres.”

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