Zeno Clash's ACE Team Interview

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Eurogamer: What's it like working on Steam?

Carlos Bordeu: For PC, Steam is becoming easily one of the best ways of distributing games. Steam and digital distribution will eventually overtake retail distribution, but for indie games like ours, Steam is considerably more important than retail distribution. That doesn't mean we're not looking at a retail release in the rest of Europe, but Steam is the most important way of distributing for us.

Eurogamer: You're busy working on Zeno Clash 2 and possibly a console port. Does that leave much time and space to make extra content for Zeno Clash 1?

Carlos Bordeu: Maybe we announced Zeno Clash 2 a little early. It was more of an announcement that we're starting work on the next project than we actually have a lot to show. I mean if you ask me for screenshots or anything, I wouldn't have them, because it's only been a month since we released the other game. We're pretty much in a design phase, so we're still working a lot on the first game.

We're currently preparing a new free downloadable content that's going to be similar to the Challenge mode but it's different: a pit challenge where you go down floors fighting opponents. We hope to have something to show in a couple of weeks - a video or something.

Eurogamer: What sort of release date are you looking at for that?

I have dropped my kebab. Who did that? Was it you? You? You?

Carlos Bordeu: Um, for this sort of thing I wouldn't expect it to take more than a month - around that time. But I'm not completely sure because we're still developing it and we don't have a milestone schedule that we have to reach. I would say maybe five weeks.

Eurogamer: How do you think the indie scene is doing these days?

Carlos Bordeu: I think the indie game development scene has been growing very fast. Where casual games a couple of years ago were the boom - the new scene - I think independent games are now, and starting to become a strong force in the industry. Games like World of Goo, Braid, Killing Floor - the indie scene is becoming pretty important.

Indie developers have more liberty to work on stranger concepts and be more experimental. Games like Zeno Clash or Braid or World of Goo would be very hard to present to a publisher with a design document. On paper they sound too weird. Until you have proof of concept you can't go forward with these games. So independent developers are self-funding their projects and that's the way these games are being done. A lot of these are done on PC, which makes it a very strong platform in terms of innovation and moving the industry forward.

Eurogamer: Why is there an indie boom now?

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Carlos Bordeu: I'm not sure. Well, yeah, there is a strong reason: digital distribution. It has to be. When you only had retail distribution there was no way to get your game out there. But now that we have digital distribution you can sell your game. Zeno Clash was too small to be a regular retail game. Without digital distribution, Zeno Clash would never have existed.

Eurogamer: Now you have that proof of concept, will you leave the indie scene behind?

Carlos Bordeu: We want to try and make our games a little big bigger and we hopefully want Zeno Clash 2 to possibly be a retail game for Xbox 360 [Carlos Bordeu contacted us to tell us PS3 is also on the cards - Ed]. But we want to keep the independent feel of the company; we want to keep making these strange games that have our own personality. In creating Zeno Clash we created an image as a company, and we want to keep that.

Eurogamer: Would you turn down an acquisition offer from a company like Valve, then?

Carlos Bordeu: Ha ha! Depends on how much they pay! Ha ha.

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