Carlos Bordeu is a developer at Chile-based
ACE Team, the creators of the game
Zeno Clash.
ACE Team was founded around 2002, and has been working on Zeno Clash since then all the way up to its release.
Community member mm3guy has interviewed Carlos Bordeu, check it out below:
mm3guy: Hey! Thanks for being here today! So, can you tell me a little about yourself and ACE Team?
Carlos: My name is Carlos Bordeu. I am one of the founders of ACE Team and I work as co-lead designer and artist among other things.
ACE Team was first a mod development team before becoming a professional development studio. As mod developers we did a lot of first person shooter total conversions. For instance we were the group behind a very old
Batman Doom total conversion (DOOM2), the
ZanZan total conversion (also for DOOM2) and the Quake 3 Arena single player mod:
The Dark Conjunction.
Back at the beginning we were just three brothers working on mods for Doom. It was Andres, Edmundo and me (Carlos) and with the first letters of our names you could form the word ‘ACE’. So that is how the name was born.
mm3guy: That's pretty cool! So, then, when did you come up with the idea behind Zeno Clash? Was it during one of these modding ventures, or after?
Carlos: Several years ago we worked on a prototype of a game called ‘Zenozoik’ using Lithtech’s Jupiter System (engine used in the game ‘No One Lives Forever 2’). That was the project we worked on after ‘The Dark Conjunction’. We wanted Zenozoik to become our first commercial game, but we tried to do something too ambitious for a small modding team, and the project never took off. A few years later we looked back at what we had done with Zenozoik, and we decided to re-make the game changing the design, and that is how Zeno Clash was born.
mm3guy: So how did your team come up with the interesting look of the Zeno Clash world?
Carlos: We drew inspiration from places where games don’t traditionally look at. We avoided the traditional fantasy (orcs, elves and unicorns) and we looked at references such as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, John Blanche’s illustrations and the movie ‘The Dark Crystal’. We really set out to give the game a different look from what was out there in the industry. Edmundo Bordeu (who is the art director) is responsible in great part for the art style too.
mm3guy: Recently announced was your team's decision to make a Zeno Clash 2, did you guys always want to make a ZC2, or was this a recent decision?
Carlos: We always wanted to do a sequel. Even before finishing the first one. We knew that it would be impossible for us to do a bigger game with open explorable environments for the first, so we focused the design on the combat mechanics and gameplay. We feel the world of Zenozoik was meant to be explored… and that is what we want to accomplish with a sequel.
mm3guy: So, how did your collaboration with Garry to have Zeno Clash content in Garry's Mod happen? Did one of you guys approach each other, or did something else happen?
Carlos: We approached Garry because we were big fans of Garry’s Mod and stuff like “
The GMod Idiot Box”. We knew we had a lot of content that would be fun to play around with and we knew it would be much easier for the community if we released the models ourselves. Even before we released the model pack some people were converting the models with a hex editor so it was obvious that there was a community interest.
mm3guy: You seem to be embracing the community side of things, which is awesome! What are your plans for allowing modifications to the game itself? A Zeno Clash SDK was announced not too long ago, what kind of things will be included in that?
Carlos: Our upcoming modification will be a new take on the tower challenges, but with a new and interesting design. We’re not just going to produce new challenges… we’re putting fights in a pit-like environment where you can move down floors. It’s more dynamic and different to the regular challenge maps and we hope to be able to show some footage in a few weeks. In regards to the SDK: We’re still looking at what we will do. After we release the new challenge mode we will focus on the SDK.
mm3guy: Well, thanks for taking part in this interview! Is there anything else you guys would like to add before wrapping up this interview?
Carlos: Thanks to you. We hope everyone enjoys fooling around with the models in GMod, and hope to see some funny videos pop-up on the web.
If you make a funny Zeno Clash movie with Garry's Mod, don't be afraid to
send it in to us!
Some links of interest:
[...]
