The Design Behind The First Person Game…Zeno Clash, IGF Finalist

Carlos talks about developing Zeno Clash, IGF Finalist

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/zeno-clash-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]GW_Fh8jtOA0[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Carlos: Hi, I’m Carlos Bordeu. I’m one of the game designers of Ace Team, the studio working on Zeno Clash, the first person source engine game fighter.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Carlos: Well, the game is a first person melee combat, like an action game with a very surreal sort of environment where the son of a hermaphrodite creature called Father-Mother. It’s a very bizarre style. It’s very unusual, not like anything else out there in the industry in terms of both game play and style and the story.

Interviewer: Can you talk about – it was nominated for what exactly?

Carlos: It was nominated for Visual Arts. I think it mainly got the nomination because of its very surreal, very fantastic sort of style for the visuals. It’s very unconventional, very colorful for what you see in first person games these days.

Interviewer: How did you guys come up with the style then?

Carlos: Well, we really didn’t want to try to get influences from movies or other games. We really wanted to get the art style from more pictorial sources, and we looked a lot at paintings. For instance, we looked at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. We also looked at the illustrations of John Blanche. In general, we wanted it to come out very surreal, very paintings-type of style of visuals.

Interviewer: You talked about different game play. What inspired it, and what exactly is its innovative game play?

Carlos: We really wanted to focus a lot of the game play in first person melee combat. In terms of – this does exist in other games, but we really thought that we could innovate in first person combat games. And we looked at doing things, such as… For instance, in the Zelda game you have a targeting system.

We did the same for our case and this means that the game plays very different to most first person combat games because you can focus on your fighter. This allows us to do stuff such as eluding attacks and, maybe, sort of feels like fighting a boxing match of Nintendo’s classic Punch Out game, something like that. It really makes the game play very different to what you see in other games.

Interviewer: You talked about a different story. What do you feel was different, and what inspired it?

Carlos: Well, the whole plot itself, as I explained in a few lines, really comes out as something you don’t really hear anywhere else. You are the son of a hermaphrodite creature called Father-Mother. He’s your father and mother at the same time, and you are part of this clan, this strong, powerful clan, in the main city of the world of Zeno Clash. You sort of commit this crime or have this conflict with Father-Mother, and you have to run away from your family which will hunt you down.

This makes you run away through this very surreal world where it’s a very archaic world where people don’t have maps of the world or they don’t know about other cities. It really makes the player run away to the confines of the world, to the end of the world, and explore and just seeing the new environments and everything is part of the fun.

Back to the story itself, it’s very unusual in terms that until you see pictures of who Father-Mother is and your brothers. They are these very strange mixture of animals and people, these creatures, and it’s very, very surreal, very unusual.

Interviewer: What were some of the design challenges that you guys faced as you developed the game?

Carlos: Well, we had many design challenges. I’d say for one thing we used the source engine. The first thing we realized, our art style, our design goals, was that the game should not have lots of straight angles and lines. Everything should be sort of disproportionate and the brush system that evolved the search engine wasn’t good for us, so we had to adapt how we build the world using static props.

These static props, we had to add a new layer of Gui so we could do proper light mapping. There were a lot of changes we had to do to the engines so that we could equate the visual style of the game to this particular engine.

Interviewer: Were there any other challenges that you had in terms of the visual style of the game to get the right feeling that you are looking for?

Carlos: Well, we had lots of challenges in terms of looking at things like lighting and how we did the colors. I wouldn’t say it was that much of a challenge in terms of the technology itself, that the engine works very well with this sort of thing, with shaders and all.

What we did have a very big challenge was with the first person combat things that we really had to rethink how the limitation of first person game is done in the source engine where you basically have these models of hands clipping out of the first person view.

We almost had to do a third person game with a first person camera placed on where the head of the player is, so that was a pretty big challenge for us.

Interviewer: Did you guys do play testing as you developed the game?

Carlos: Yes, we did a lot of play testing. It has been a very iterative process. The game design was so, maybe, unique and different to what else was out there that we had to test a lot of the concepts. A lot of things sounded very nice on paper, but they worked horribly after the beginning when we implemented them.

For instance, at the beginning you had to detect whether your opponents were attacking you from above or below, like if they were going to punch you in the face or in the stomach. That meant the player had to sort of look up or down as he blocked attacks.

It was a mess. It never worked very well. So, a lot of the design when it came out was put on paper and everything, but as we started implementing and prototyping a lot of the features of the game, we realized what things worked and what did not.

Interviewer: What were the top three things that you wish you had known when you first started or things that you learned as you developed the game?

Carlos: For starters, how we were going to work with the brush system to adapt it to the model, there were a lot of experiments. It would have been really nice to maybe had more a clear view on how we were going to do that. But, I think it ended out working very well. I wished we could have prototyped more the combat mechanics and everything because it took us a very long time.

I even heard this from the guys from Dartmouth Magic [?]. They kind of had the same problem that as they developed the combat system they had the mappers and modelers doing the entire world.

So, by the time the combat system was completely finished a lot of the game and the levels were already built. That meant that you had to re-adapt your levels to the combat mechanics and when the levels are close to finish trying to change them can be a little bit difficult.

The third thing, well, I don’t know. It’s been a long process.

Interviewer: That’s fine. When is the game going to get released?

Carlos: The game is being released on April 21st worldwide on Steam. It’s actually pre-selling as we speak.

Interviewer: What’s next in store then for you guys?

Carlos: Oh, wow. We definitely want to do more things with Zeno Clash. I mean, we’re a small indie team. Less than 10 people worked on this game, and there’s a lot of things that people have asked us about the game, if the game’s an RPG, it is open to the worlds. And that’s a lot of interesting concepts that we would have liked to explore with Zeno Clash but, obviously, couldn’t because of the size of our team.

It is something we will want to look into now, obviously, if the game is successful enough so that we can continue it and make a bigger brother type.

Interviewer: Can you guys talk about some of the challenges of dealing with a somewhat larger team, more than one or two people as you’re developing your game?

Carlos: Well, I think we’ve been very fortunate by being a small team we’ve got very good communication. In our case, we have exceptionally good communication because for those who don’t know nothing about the history of Ace Team, Ace Team comes from the initials of three brothers: Andres, Carlos and Edmundo.

We’re three brothers that started making mods so a big part of the team is actually family. We’ve got very good communication between each other, and we’ve been very fortunate to keep on having people on our team who all have a very clear vision. We know where we are going heading forth but, obviously, I worked previously at another company where I had to manage bigger teams.

The whole way in which you work as you start working with bigger teams, the sort of change you have to do for management – you work more and spend more time as a producer and, maybe, not so much time doing the art or the design of the game which is sometimes more fun.

I don’t think we want to grow like to 50 people or something like that. I think we’ve really done creditable work being a small team, and I wouldn’t expect us to grow like such a large team.

Interviewer: Where can people find more information about the game?

Carlos: Oh well, you can go to www.zenoclash.com, and from there you can go to our forums. We have a blog. We have all sorts of information. We just recently released a web comic. There’s all sorts fun stuff for people to look at.

Interviewer: Did you guys have a development blog while you were developing the game and video updates? How did that work?

Carlos: No, we didn’t have a blog all during the whole development process. We had forums but not a blog. The blog is pretty recent, but we’ve been trying to add very interesting things about how we made the game. We have entries that range from how we did the environments to how we did the logos for the game.

Interviewer: You said Zeno. It’s z-e-n-o or is it…

Carlos: It’s z-e-n-o clash c-l-a-s-h.

Interviewer: Thank you very much. Take care.