Notícias
The Eternal Cylinder – ACE Team’s Weirdest Game
C
Carlos Bordeu
I remember suddenly being amazed by a concept that appeared in my imagination. First came the Cylinder... then the little alien creature at its mercy. They both formed a vivid image in my brain that I find hard to describe where it came from. But they just popped in there without a warning.Obviously, being a game developer, I decided to form this idea into something visually striking. But that something was not a game. It was just an idea… a vision of a concept. It had no real purpose other than to explore a fantasy that had been born out of a mix of unrelated subjects that all seemed to fit only in my head.
In mid-2015, after some help from Leo (Programming) and Patricio (Music), I shared my small personal creation on YouTube. I was happy to show what progress I had made on something that I honestly had no idea where it was headed. Little did I know that this showcase would open the doors to the beginning of the craziest and most difficult title ACE Team has ever created. It was not until over a year after, at a trip to the Games Developers Conference, that The Eternal Cylinder would become something truly important for the studio.
All of us at ACE had been hard at work on a prototype of a shooter which we planned on showcasing (privately) at the event. This new FPS was meant to be what we hoped we would be doing “next”. The shiny new prototype was the main attraction we had to present at San Francisco. However, we decided to take along The Eternal Cylinder demo, just as a second showing (in case the other game failed to impress). It was at GDC that we came to realize that, regardless of a lack of gameplay, the visuals and ideas behind The Eternal Cylinder overshadowed the newer prototype. Everyone was intrigued and wanted to know more of this unique little demo. It was then that we understood the studio needed to turn this abstract vision into a full-fledged title.
Sometimes our best work comes from unintentional or unexpected beginnings. The Eternal Cylinder is the amazing result of a team which took my initial ideas and made it into something magical. The art, the engineering, the design, the music… everyone at ACE put something personal into this project and made it something of their own. It took us a long road to refine and polish the game, but we are finally at the end of the road, and I think we have the best title we have worked on together.The Eternal Cylinder will likely be declared ACE Team’s weirdest game. A project about a giant rolling tube crushing an alien world, where you play as a herd of little “elephant heads” with two legs… this isn’t your everyday game. But as much as I have always enjoyed the label that our games are ‘weird’ (I even used the word in the title of this blog), I do find that it sometimes trivializes aspects of our work. The game is not weird for the sake of being weird. It is weird because we tried to do something new. Something truly new. And that means taking risks. Making something weird is the hardest, because you start from a blank baseline… because you have nothing to compare to. You are not making something like “x”, but with a little bit of “y”.
Anyone who is around my age was able to experience a time when looking at the box art of videogames would open your imagination in ways that titles cannot do today. The pixelated artwork of the titles of the 1980s was only a partial rendition of what a game was offering. What you see is what you get in games today – but that was not what we experienced as kids in the good old days. A lot of it was what we imagined existed in those crazy and totally weird games.
To me ‘The Eternal Cylinder’ is our very best attempt at doing a modern game as if it were envisioned in another time. A time when there were less “best practices” about what to do (and what not to do) in game design. A time when making games was about exploring the infinite potential of your imagination, unbound by the influence of years of game mechanic iterations evolving in a specific direction.We hope everyone enjoys the game we have made …but more importantly; we hope it opens a door into your own imagination.