It’s no secret that we’ve recently partnered up with Croatian game-dev veterans and our friends over at 2×2 Games to create Unity of Command II. 

Good news: the game is progressing swimmingly and according to plan! Tom Uzelac, the lead designer, has done a good job with documenting the progress so far. His blogs (or Development Diaries) have a cult following of their own in the wargaming community. 

Even if you never read those blogs, check out the latest entry, as Tom turns a new leaf and decides to focus more on the game itself instead of lamenting the process. 

En Route to Rouen entry explains some of the most interesting new mechanics in Unity of Command II, such as dealing with enemy prisoners, gathering intel and piercing the fog of war to locate hidden enemy units. Pretty screenshots, too! 

Advance to Rouen by clicking here.

“Regarding football these Croteam guys are fanatics, it’s unbelievable … for them winning the cup seems to be the most important thing in the world.” – D. Đurović, in 2017. interview http://www.makinggames.biz/conference/reboot-develop-2017-interview-part-1-2305182-2,2305228.html

You’ve might have heard this somewhere already, but Croatian national football finished 2nd in the World Cup! The match against Russia went into overtime and felt more like a long and difficult battle, like wrestling a bear while trying to play football. England nearly gave us a synchronized collective heart attack in the first few minutes, but Croatia won that match in the end. And then lost to France in the finals.

Before, during and after each Croatian match our fans from Russia, England, France and all over the world reached out, cheering or taunting. We did the same. There have been plenty of op-eds discussing why exactly this feels good (right up until your team loses) and discussing what happens when the entire population comes together to lose themselves in euphoria, or why is football, in fact, a highly politicised form of national expression.

Zadar celebrates Croatia’s football team second place in the World Cup. Foto by: filip_brala

Things are much simpler for us at Croteam – we just love playing the game!

It’s no surprise that Football Glory was the first game the studio created and released for Amiga, back in 1994. “It made perfect sense at a time” remembers Davor Hunski, Croteam’s CCO “We loved videogames and we loved playing football. We still play. Well, most of us do.”

A group of high school friends with a passion for creating video games, and that’s what Croteam was in the 90s, pitched the idea of a football game to Alen Ladavac, Croteam’s CTO. He responded with a characteristic and unapologetic call for a game design document: “Sure. I’ll do the code. If you explain the rules.”

Five-A-Side, an indoor version of Football Glory, followed a couple of years later and even scored a nice award at a competition in Japan. The award felt nice, almost as nice as Croatia entering the World Cup for the first time in 1998. and shocking the world by finishing in the third place.

Serious Sam and The Talos Principle followed, today we even have this thing called Croteam Incubator, but we still love and play football to this day and couldn’t have wished for a better birthday present for our 25th anniversary than Croatia’s second place in the World Cup. Admittedly, not all of us wear checkered jerseys to work, and some of us insist that Surfin USM  (“You fat bastard!”) reflects the sentiment for the sport better than some other football related stuff that came out of Croatia, but this year’s World Cup result remains a pretty big deal for Croteam, a dev team out of Croatia.

Why? Because it feels very much like reading about Serious Sam for the first time on Old Man Murray in 2000:

“It’s one of the greatest news stories ever. It has everything: war, hardship, broken English, and a great, technically accomplished, already playable game. It’s just the kind of uplifting, underdogs-struggling-against-impossible-odds success story that could only happen in America or Croatia.“

PS Reboot Develop Blue just announced the first wave of speakers for 2019, impressive as ever, but here’s the most important part: the international industry tournament is happening again. Come to Croatia and play football with us!

It’s time to go outside and play, they say. Fine. Let’s just stock up on the games before we go.

Steam Summer Sale is on and all of our titles are so heavily discounted that we’re practically giving them away! Take a look at our 25th anniversary storefront and grab Croteam’s games up to 90$ off!
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/croteam

(Serious Sam 3:BFE running on a ASUS Republic of Gamers laptop in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Credit: @plethora_etc)

Not Davor Hunski.

Megalomaniac event managers of Reboot Develop have just updated the seemingly ever-growing list of this year’s speakers. The rest of the line up will be revealed as the conference nears, bringing the total number of speakers to “more than 110” industry veterans (in 7 tracks).

Currently there are “only” 34 speakers listed, but it’s hard not to be impressed just by glancing at the list. It’s also a great honor to see two of our very own devs in company of these games industry celebrities.

Davor Hunski, Croteam’s Chief Creative Officer and Grandfather of Croatian gaming industry will be joined by Admir Elezović, studio’s co-founder and Art Director for a talk on their current project. Which may or may not be Serious Sam 4. They aren’t saying (yet).

Regardless, Reboot Develop is shaping up as the most unique, premier and high-end games industry event in Europe and there are plenty of reasons to attend the conference taking place in historical seaside city of Dubrovnik, aka “real world King’s Landing”. The conference will be taking place from 19th to 21st of April 2018.

We’ve already announced this project in a blog post, so this is just a quick reminder that Serious Sam Fusion 2017 is now available (in beta). It’s a fresh build of Serious Sam games developed by Croteam. The best part? If you own a Serious Sam game listed below you’ll be getting a Serious Sam Fusion 2017 version of that game for FREE!

Serious Sam Fusion 2017 is also a central hub for existing (and upcoming) Serious Sam games that will enable seamless integration of new engine features, patches and upgrades.

Games available in Serious Sam Fusion 2017

• Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter – now available!
• Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter (coming soon)
• Serious Sam 3: BFE (coming soon)
• VR versions of all games will be a part of Serious Sam Fusion 2017, too!

Please keep in mind that this release of Serious Sam Fusion 2017 is currently in beta; you’ll experience extreme violence, inexplicable joy, some sadness, sometimes all at once, and, how shall we put it… eeerm, occasional bugs. Please use the official discussions page to let us know. Thank you!

What does it do?
Serious Sam Fusion 2017 will enable a lot of cool new features, like a common workshop and cross-game mods. All of the games can be started from one application, so you can jump between playing The First Encounter level to a Serious Sam 3 level and back without exiting the game. When listing game servers, servers playing TFE, TSE, SS3 – will all appear in the same list and you can vote map across games if you want. Oh, and VR games will be able to be played in multiplayer together with their flat counterparts! For a full list of new and upcoming features, please visit our Steam store page.

Achievements, languages, Linux and “blink” teleport mode for VR are now fully supported in the game, as well as keyboard + mouse and gamepad support (as promised).

The full changelog for the latest update is available on Steam forums, here.

Oh, and while we’re at it, we also updated the prices on our merch store and everything is at 50% off until February 21. Check it out!

Hallelujah! Another free update is out now!

A free update for all Serious Sam owners, Serious Fusion 2017, is coming. Also: SteamOS/Linux/OSX support, more VR games and The Last Hope “Shanti” update are on the way!

New planet, new guns, new enemy type, new features AND a new boss. Shaanti update for SSVR: The Last Hope is coming!

Good news everybody! A great PR team could milk this list for an entire month or more, but since our PR team (and in reality it’s just me, the bald middle aged guy writing this. Hi!) never claimed to be any good we’re just going to drop this right here.

It’s been an incredibly exciting time for us as we launched our first VR title and our first game in Early Access. We were amazed with the amount of positive comments, great ideas and new features that our fans suggested. We were also amazed by our own stupidity and naivety. We tried to implement, well, almost all of those ideas.

While co-op was and remains one of the often requested features, the truth is that a fairly small percentage of players actually plays in co-op. But we said we’d listen, so we rushed to implement this feature and were very proud that we actually pulled it off. Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope in co-op requires serious skill and teamwork at harder difficulty settings and the game is even more fun when played with a friend. The thing is, the decision to implement co-op straight away made a joke of our timetable for regular content updates and this left us with more and more fans requesting a status update on the game (we DO have one today).
Note to self: stick to the original GDD and ship planned features first, collect Early Access feedback and implement those ideas later.

Case in point: one of the most requested features from VR fans was actually moving around the map and exploring. Since The Last Hope movement was on a room-scale level and the whole game is essentially an arcade-like experience and a love letter to old machines, adding full locomotion to the game meant that we’d have to start from scratch, ditch or re-make most of the levels and basically abandon the original idea altogether. Instead, we started experimenting with VR and prototyping movement in The First Encounter and made surprisingly good progress. So good, in fact, that we felt confident that the game was *almost* ready for VR. The decision was made to bring this game to Early Access as well.

The good: we couldn’t have possibly predicted all of the preferred ways of locomotion, but once more we got amazing feedback and added even more ways to move around the virtual world. And comments like this kept us moving.
The bad: We now have two games in Early Access, both set in Serious Sam universe, which seems to create some confusion among fans and it’s our fault. To make things right and to make it perfectly clear that those are two very different games, we came up with a brilliant plan (if we do say so ourselves): we’ll just add two or three more games into the VR mix! That way there can be no doubt: we remain committed to VR and having fun with this amazing new tech! Of course, we’ll first ship updates and work faster to complete the existing games in Early Access. Our VR teams were recently expanded and today we’re announcing a tech update that will enable us to easily ship updated code more regularly!

Finally, it’s been a really long time since somebody asked about Serious Sam 4 in the comments section, but we’ll go ahead and say it anyway: yes, it’s still happening.

Oh, right, here’s the news:

[Read More]

Videogame development is booming in Croatia. New studios are founded almost on a monthly basis and the existing ones are rapidly expanding. But there’s a downside to this exciting story: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to recruit new talent in the industry.

The main culprit is easily identified: there is a huge technological and mental gap between what the Croatian education offers and what the contemporary young people and game development studios need.

And it’s not a small gap. Should educational system be reformed to include STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) it would take decades for first results to show.

So what does Croatia do? Instead of waiting for the abstract curricular reform that may or may not happen, an Indiegogo campaign was recently launched to place BBC micro:bit technology in every elementary school in Croatia. Croteam was just one of its many backers.

“We backed this campaign because we are selfish.” said Croteam’s CEO Roman Ribaric. “We want young people to get started with programming as soon as possible, so we can snag them to come and work with us on future projects as soon as possible.”

“It’s simple and honest, but when you consider that every other dev studio and IT company wants the same, it’s no longer about private interests.” explains Croteam’s CTO Alen Ladavac. “It’s a national interest and it’s great to see that more and more people understand this and support the campaign.”

The crowdfunding campaign raised over 200.000 USD, more than three times its initial goal in only five days, quickly becoming the most successfully funded Croatian campaign. Indiegogo campaign was launched by Croatian Makers led by family Bakic (Nenad and Rujana), a private initiative for better education.

“There’s no doubt in my mind this STEM revolution in Croatian schools will result in a lot of gifted young developers” said Croteam’s Chief Creative Officer Davor Hunski “and thanks to this campaign the revolution is exactly what we started. In fact, I’m sure many of those who’ll receive this technology today, will join Croteam on some future projects.”

Are you deeply concerned about the state of education in Croatia? There’s still time: you can back the Indiegogo campaign here.

A new update has been released for SSVR: The First Encounter, bringing many bug fixes and tweaks to the game, but one new feature literally stands out: world and weapon scaling! What it means is that you can make things smaller or bigger in the game to make them look just right. Or go overboard with the slider and become a giant Sam. Or a vertically challenged Sam. Look for this option in – wait for it! – Options (and then select Game options).

The game now also supports blink teleport and includes first experimental support for gamepad or keyboard and mouse, since both features have been requested on Steam forums. Read the whole change log here.

This update includes all fixes from previous beta builds, including optimization tweaks to the locomotion system and improvements in the low-level rendering systems for both DX and Vulkan.

Goran Adrinek, Lead gameplay programmer

Introduction

This article explains the work it took to implement mixed reality into our game using our own engine. Apart from using the approaches already taken by some other teams, we have developed some new techniques that work great to solve latency issues as well as make camera calibration really simple for the user. We haven’t found anyone describe such solutions to these common problems, so our implementation should be interesting both to people new to the subject and to the people who already did mixed reality and want to improve their approach. 

How it all started for us

Minigun in action

Mixed reality was already found to be a great way to demonstrate VR experience outside of VR. Naturally, we also wanted to use mixed reality for promotion of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. We started implementing mixed reality two weeks before the EGX 2016 show so we could be featured on the Vive stand, capture some promotional footage as well as show off our game in all its glory featuring the physical minigun controller.  [Read More]

Attention, recruits!

We’re celebrating the recent Early Access release of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope on Steam and we’re giving away four Radeon RX 480 cards!

To further bolster the morale of our troops fighting against the relentless Mental’s hordes, we’re throwing in two codes for the Serious Sam’s VR simulator AND T-shirts signed by the Earth Defense Force scientists and staff (including some members of Croteam).

Already have the game and a Radeon card? Add another Radeon RX 480 to your setup to enable smoother gameplay and eye-popping visuals as Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope now supports AMD LiquidVR Affinity Multi-GPU setups. Enter the competition here:

Additionally, we’re activating a week long discount on ALL things Serious Sam on our merchandise store, including the brand new Serious Sam bundle. Check it out: merch.croteam.com

To enter the competition click here.

Oh yeah!