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'The Endless Cylinder' Creator Tells Us More About His Adorable Baby Alien Game

This Chilean game about a baby alien on a surrealist world looks amazing.
Image: Carlos Bordeu

Chilean developer ACE Team makes wonderfully weird games, and a recently released video teasing its latest project looks like no exception.

The video for The Endless Cylinder shows us a faraway planet imagined with ACE Team's signature surreal style. It has avocado-shaped plants as tall as buildings; walking, chomping mouths; and a creature that is half truck, half elephant. But the planet's defining feature is a gigantic cylinder that stretches as far as the eye can see, slowly steamrolling everything in sight. You play as an alien, a cute little ball with two legs and a trunk, who just hatched out of his egg and into this hostile environment.

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Even the game's creator, ACE Team co-founder Carlos Bordeu, doesn't know much more about what you'll do in The Endless Cylinder because it's so early in development, but he's excited to find out.

"Right now I'm feeling very motivated with all the feedback I'm getting from the people who are seeing the video, but I need to develop and define more the project before I can share more," Bordeu told me in an email. "Hopefully not too long from now."

ACE Team made its debut in 2009 with a Zeno Clash, a first-person fighting game set in a world that looked like a Salvador Dalí painting minus the melting clocks, and followed it up in 2011 with Rock of Ages, a strategy game about hurtling giant balls at historical figures.

"I originally thought about the concept for [The Endless Cylinder] during the end of development of Zeno Clash 2 [released in 2013]," Bordeu said. "I was one of the lead environment artists for the game and I had to look at a ton of surreal and bizarre artwork for inspiration (Dali, Bosch, etc). The idea of this huge cylinder came up to me at one point, but made no sense for Zeno Clash."

Bordeu thought the idea was powerful enough to pursue a small prototype on his own, and he considers it more of a personal project than an official ACE Team game. He made it mostly alone, and outside the company's regular working hours, building it slowly at night, on weekends, and holidays.

"Both my brothers (and co-founders of ACE) are aware that I'm doing this, and we've talked about maybe working on it in the studio (making it an ACE Team title), but first I have to reach certain milestones… get the project more defined," Bordeu said.

He's currently experimenting with design quite a bit, but is looking to develop gameplay that would would create a bond between the player and the unhatched egg your alien is born next to, letting the player move it around and save it from predators and the cylinder.

"That would generate interesting gameplay possibilities since having to worry about both yourself and your unborn brother would make the game more interesting (just from a mechanical point of view)," Bordeu said. "But we'll see. I have to see what works best."