Zeno Clash

Hello. My name is Carlos Bordeu and I am a co-founder of ACE Team and one of the game designers and producers of Zeno Clash.

I think my interest in games comes from way back when my family got a Mac Plus (our first computer) in the early/mid 80’s. The computer came with this incredible game: ‘Dark Castle’. Shortly after playing the game countless times I would find myself drawing my own levels with a pen and paper. I was still too young to be able to make anything that worked on a computer, but I still think of those drawings as my first incursion into the world of mod making (which ended up being the path through which I got into the industry).

I certainly hope so. :) But I think the main thing to look for is more diversification in the industry. The big budget titles will still sell, and people will still buy them. The fact that we are releasing Zeno Clash in the middle of today’s chaotic economy is just a coincidence.

What we can look forward to is that hopefully more publishers will look at indie teams as good prospects for investments. In the end games are about having fun and enjoyable experiences. If we play too many similar games we tend to get bored of them, and I think independent game developers are definitely doing the most novel games these days. Braid and World of Goo are great examples of games that have challenged the AAA gaming scene.

I think the most obvious advantage is the cost of producing a game compared to doing it elsewhere. The cost of life in Chile is cheaper than in USA, Europe or Japan. Taking this into account and considering that this is our first title (and it is self-funded), means that our budget was significantly lower compared to the figures you hear of in the rest of the industry.

The biggest disadvantage would probably be that in Chile there are no more than a handful of game developers and only a couple of game development studios. It’s a very rare job here and establishing business relationships is always more difficult when you are far away from your contacts.

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. We built the demo hoping it would be our first commercial project, but despite our efforts we tried to make a game that had too many features which lacked a solid core design for both art and gameplay mechanics.

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.

Several reasons: First it was different… and we didn’t want to do a game that looked unique but played like everything else out there. Second; it was a great challenge as very few developers have tried to do melee in first person and it was a great opportunity for us to innovate. Third would be because it was great for the story, since a family conflict is the central theme of the plot, and what can be more personal than fighting up close against your brothers and sisters?

Most FPS’s have awesome character models and enemies, but when you are fighting with machineguns and sniper rifles, most of the time your opponents are small figures very far away in the screen. If we were going to produce several unique and visually compelling characters it was counter-producing to make them always fight from a great distance.

How many people use sniper scopes to look at the hi-res texture resolutions of the dead ragdolled enemies in FPS games because it’s the only moment when they can take the time to have a paused look at them? At least that’s what I do! :)

I think the thing that needed most iteration was how the melee combat mechanics would blend with the far combat (shooting) mechanics. We had a cool melee system but it was very hard to get our enemies to behave correctly considering that they have to swap their combat modes from regular FPS shooting and taking cover to a 1 on 1 melee combat with the player. All this system affects almost all aspects of our game’s design and implementation; from AI to level design to animations. We had to rework a lot of things to get body awareness right. Every change could potentially impact several areas of the game’s development so this was probably the hardest issue of development.

Our biggest regret is probably finishing the gameplay mechanics too far into the game’s development. I think we should have prototyped the levels a bit more before producing the art. We ended up having some beautiful polished levels that just didn’t feel right in gameplay. This meant we eventually were forced to hack them and do a very large amount of rework on those because all the lighting and modeling was close to final but the structure of the level needed to change. I think this problem can be minimized with prototyping but it’s a problem that I suppose happens to teams that have experimental game design and a larger art team than a programming one. I would definitely restructure some things for future development but I’m confident that with Zeno Clash’s core design functional, things will be much easier for any future projects or sequels.

If we deduct the time we spent working on the first prototype build we sent to Valve then the game would be in development for close to two years. Before we decided to go independent and started working on the project full time we spent a lot of time working on a prototype with the Source Engine, but basically as a mod (using all the open community tools). We did this in our spare time and I would estimate that we worked on the prototype for more than a year - but should we have done it as part of a full time job, then I think it would have amounted to about 4-5 months.

Only a month or so of development time is left. Then we still have to do some final QA, but we’re talking about weeks. This is our first full independent project so planning and scheduling hasn’t been one of our greater strengths. :) The game was originally due for late 3rd quarter of 2008, but I think that date was unrealistic for a small team like ours.

As I said we started off with the same tools that were open to the Half-Life 2 community scene. Later on as licensees we would get access to all the additional stuff from the Source engine, which was great. Source has also been updating itself through the years and we have incorporated things such as HDR as they have become available. The facial expression tools of source have been invaluable for our project. Moving from bone based facial animations to Source’s ‘faceposer’ tool was a great step forward.

An interesting note is that Zeno Clash was in design before Half-Life 2 was released, so we prototyped some models and early tech with the Doom3 engine (mostly for normal mapping). We used orb (open renderbump tool) for all our early normal mapping work and tested out a lot of material properties in Doom3 model viewers. Obviously a lot of this changed as we got access to new tech, but when we started out we used a lot of open tools for our experiments.

In terms of what we would have liked to do better; it was probably planning the scope and length of the development cycle. For a small team creating a big game like this, it was very difficult and I think we could have done a better job of prototyping and planning the game’s features. It is something we will definitely do better from now and on.

In terms of what we feel we did well was simply following our design & vision and avoiding to adopt any existing trends. By separating ourselves from the current gaming scene, I believe we have given ourselves a greater chance of success.

The atmosphere, characters and story are so different that a lot of media has expressed that the game is worth checking out for just the art itself. But I think the gameplay mechanics are also innovative and I think a lot of people will really enjoy the game for its melee combat. The whole combination makes a game that is very different from others in the market, and I think that is something great to look forward to in any title of any genre or platform.

I would encourage developers (especially smaller studios) to look at other forms of art and media when designing projects. In our team we get a lot of inspiration from paintings and I cannot see why games cannot be as visually compelling or exciting as any other art form. In many genres games tend to look at Hollywood and other competitive games for sources of inspiration - and I think that works fine for many titles - but I think that in todays race for photorealism smaller developers may find themselves having a really hard time catching up with the bigger studios.

With a little luck and a good reception for our debut title we hope to continue exploring the unusual world of Zeno Clash and other strange and unique game ideas.