Interview With Carlos Bordeu From ACE Team – The Deadly Tower of Monsters and The Endless Cylinder

Few independent video game developers branch out from their comfort and style of game development. However, ACE Team is one developer that doesn’t simply follow the beaten path. Instead, they design unique creations and worlds for gamers to enjoy.

The studio was founded in 2002 in Santiago, Chile, by brothers Andres, Carlos, and Edmundo Bordeu, with their debut title Zeno Clash. Since then the development studio has released Rock of Ages, Abyss Odyssey, and Zeno Clash II.

We here at Gameranx got the opportunity to interview Carlos Bordeu about their recent release of The Deadly Tower of Monsters, a side-project of his called The Endless Cylinder, along with what else is in store with the the development studio.

GR: When it comes to indie game developers, they tend to stick with a specific feel and genre. However, ACE Team certainly doesn’t follow the beaten path. It almost seems as if every release is something truly unique and different than what ACE Team has developed before. What inspired you when it came to developing your latest release, The Deadly Tower of Monsters?

For Deadly Tower we wanted to do a “dungeon crawler” type game, but wanted to innovate on the game design, and our proposition was making something where we could play with the verticality of level design – something we felt was unique to the genre. Most of these types of games are super flat, so we really wanted to push the concept by making a whole game around vertical ascension. Originally the game’s art design was a more generic fantasy style, (but that was only while we were coming up with a strong visual identity). Doing the game based on retro Sci-Fi came later during the development of the project proposal.

GR: You recently announced that a four player coop would be added into The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Could you elaborate on the decision in bringing the new multiplayer mode into the game?

The multiplayer mode came as an experiment that the programmers were toying around with. It was never originally planned for the game. It is local coop only because doing full online would require a massive re-design. It’s more of an “extra” rather than something of the core game itself, though I can say it is super fun.

GR: For the most part, ACE Team has released most of their video game catalog to PC, Microsoft, and Sony. Could we expect to see a release of The Deadly Tower of Monsters for the Xbox One console?

Unfortunately no. Deadly Tower was created with a custom build of Unreal Engine 3 for PS4 (there is no official support for the next gen consoles for Unreal Engine 3), so doing it for both consoles was just out of our reach. Now that we’ve moved on to Unreal Engine 4 we can look at both consoles for future titles.

GR: Your latest release deals with science fiction B-rated movies and the great thing about it is that there’s plenty of films out there to take inspiration from. How likely is it that we’ll see more content pushed into The Deadly Tower of Monsters?

We’ve always supported our titles way past release, and we have some ideas we want to explore for Deadly Tower. We already made a massive update (PC only) with the coop mode. We’ll have to see when we can add more new content.

GR: Obviously, I have to ask about The Endless Cylinder. This was something that I personally fell in love with after I saw the announcement video and I’m still very much confused as to what the game is about. Could you elaborate on what exactly The Endless Cylinder is?

The game is meant to be an open-worldish exploration title, where you play the role of a newborn creature that begins it’s life in this inhospitable surreal world. A big part will be discovering the flora / fauna, but for now the game is in very early (and experimental) stages of development.  I actually can’t say what the cylinder itself is without spoiling the story, so I’ll have to leave you with some mystery… 🙂

GR: Within the announcement video, it was revealed that this was a project of yours. Is there a chance we’ll see this production as a more centered development piece under the ACE Team?

This project still remains as something we’d like to pursue at ACE, but it isn’t an official title under development by the studio yet. It started out as a personal project that I was working on by myself, and later I got Leo (our lead programmer) and Pato Meneses (our composer) to help me out with. There’s no way I can finish a whole game of that visual and production complexity on my own, so we still have to see when we can fit it in our pipeline.

GR: ACE Team has released The Deadly Tower of Monsters earlier this year, The Endless Cylinder is labeled as a side-project, is it safe to assume the development team is secretly working on their next release? Is there anything we can know about this project?

We are indeed very deep in development of our next title. Work actually started working on it on 2015 – so the game is well into production. Though I can’t say what it is, I can say that it’ll be something that fans of our studio will certainly love.