How did you come up with the idea of making such a game?

[musehead]

I mean, I love it!

[[ACE] Dimaleth]

From this dev stream:

Okay, Sar Mase Panchu
asks, "What inspired you with the idea of making a cylinder?" Like the bad guys' cylinder,
that's unusual. So they're asking this. Yeah, this came through a lot of time ago when we were looking
at a lot of surreal art for designs, probably during the development of Xenoclash 2. So I had
this sort of compilation of several artists and there's fascinating stuff if you start looking for
surreal artwork on the internet. And a lot of it, if you look at it, even Dalí and some of the more
traditional artists, if you look at it, they have these monolithic shapes in the environment,
in environments. Like you can have giant cubes hanging up in the environment, you can have
giant spheres and they're mixing around. And the cylinder is kind of a basic shape.
But for me the cylinder, as soon as I thought about it, it was, okay, a cylinder not only looks
like impressive from an artistic point of view, it also has this like gameplay
implication. So maybe a sphere or a cube would look like more like something that would feel like
something that you would go and explore. So if you think about Destiny, they have this giant sphere,
artificial sphere hanging in the sky, and that really makes for quite an amazing vista and
something that really pulls you into the sort of the fiction of the world. And the cylinder, I felt
was very unique in a sense that it had the same impact in a sense of being something so like
dramatic, but it also allowed us to to incorporate this really, really unique aspect of gameplay,
which was simply flattening the entire world.

From this dev stream:

So let's start with the first one. How did you come up with the idea of the cylinder moving forward and not in different direction like somewhere else?
So, we wanted to have this like idea of like this massive force that is always like kind of pushing forward because we didn't want players to be always spending their time on the same location.
We wanted to force players to explore and move forward. It was a neat premise to a survival game because in survival games players tend to create their camps and invest all their resources in creating like a safe haven or a safe location.
So we wanted like our hub, our character hub, to be forced to relocate. So that really tied in well with the idea of this massive force like pushing forward.
Again, when Carlos kind of created the concept of this like eternal cylinder, I think there wasn't much of an option to do any otherwise. It was more of a thing of, OK, how do we control? How much time do we keep the cylinder idle?
And when do we decide to push forward? And with what strength? So those are kind of the concepts behind the idea of this massive force.

From this dev stream:

Alistar is asking, "How did you come up with a giant living cylinder that murders the whole world?
Perhaps they want to know why you chose the shape."
I've talked about this before.
It's interesting that now we're gonna go see the cylinder creature also.
The cylinder, the reason was for the obvious reason.
Basically if you have a giant cylinder and you want to do a game about survival
and you have it basically crushing everything,
it gives you a very, very unique mechanic.
Mechanically speaking, from one point of view you're basically doing something very cool from a visual point of view.
It's like very... you've never seen something like that in a game, a giant cylinder destroying...
so artistically it has that interesting aspect,
but mechanically it also changes very much how you design a game.
Actually that was one of the reasons this game was so hard to make,
because it has such big implications in the game design on all fronts on how progression is done,
how enemy AI is done, how the story had to be structured,
what kind of things we could do in terms of... it changes everything.
So definitely this has been our most ambitious project up to date because of the scope.
I would say everything boils down, everything comes back to the cylinder.
If it weren't because of the cylinder, I think this would be a very, very different game.

The Eternal Cylinder dev streams playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOvUdrXsVWM7V20Tgq0BS8mT8MzAFbsww

[musehead]

Thanks! I love your work and I am always by the way you are capable to manage this kind of fantasy so peculiar and unique. One thing is to imagine something bizarre, another is to imagine it and be perfectly in control, using this grotesque world, creatures and thing for a coherent and engaging purpose.

Your epic is marvellous. I really felt the characters and the story in Zeno Clash 1 and 2, and I'm amazed for how good is the rendition of the spirit of adventure here in The Eternal Cylinder.