Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter is out from Early Access and it’s available as a fully-fledged game on Steam.
We have been busy with polishing the game ’cause we wanted only best features for you guys. List of all new changes and fixes can be found here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/552450/discussions/0/133261124637972402/
For all the additional info and feedback visit our Steam Community page where our tireless IT and marketing team is ready to answer all the burning questions.
Today we are celebrating the beginning of Serious Sam glory, the release of first series in Sam’s universe, The First Encounter. We were young twenty-something guys that shared one mutual dream – to develop video games. Serious Sam: The First Encounter was our breakthrough title and, oh boy, it caused a commotion in the gaming community. Demo for the game became the most downloaded demo of the summer 2000. Croteam partnered up with the Gathering of Developers (Devolver Digital today) and they became our publishers for this and all future Sam’s titles.
Fast-forward 16 years later and we are in 2017., year of virtual reality. We love VR and we love experimenting with it and one of our newest experiments is Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter. It’s a full locomotion game for the brave ones with the possibility of teleportation for the entry-level VR players. Game is in Early Access on Steam and it’s set for the full release soon.
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
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.
YES YES YES! Freshly released update for Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope brings you complete new episode – Shaanti! And three new game mechanics! And nine new enemies! And one big boss! And two new amazing weapons! And tons of stability fixes and optimizations! And new music! And… what are you exactly waiting for? Head on to Steam and get the game (or update it now in case you are already a lucky owner)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/465240/
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:
So… almost a year after the release of The First Encounter, on February 5th, 2002 (though some shops in the UK started selling the game two weeks earlier!), we released Serious Sam: The Second Encounter worldwide. We worked even harder on that one, as TFE was received with such critical acclaim that we didn’t want to disappoint our fans, so the sequel had to be even better than the original.
Naturally, in order to fill shoes that big, we had to bring more people on board. The first two to join the party and increase our number to a hearty dozen were Ivan Mika and Nikola Mosettig. Ivan was hired as a level designer, while Nikola ended up in the programming department, though he wanted to be a designer as well… Fifteen years later, and they are both still with us, we just can’t get rid of them (and Nikola is still not a level designer) 🙂
Here is what they have to say:
“The first level I built was inspired by Teotihuacan, an ancient Mesoamerican city located in a huge flat valley. I was so excited that I was given a chance to work on it, that I just worked and worked and worked on it, day and night until it ended up being so big, we had to split it into three levels in the end (which was exactly 1/4 of the full game)! It also contained some experiments I did with jump pads and gravity that turned out to be some of the most memorable experiences in the game (and probably the most difficult and hated ones).”
Ivan Mika, Level designer for TSE (today: Level design lead)
“During the development of TSE, we had some issues with framerate, mostly in our newly built particle system. I managed to single-handedly DOUBLE our framerate just by deleting a duplicate line of code that was making everything render twice (which I introduced into code in the first place)!”
Nikola Mosettig, Content programmer (today: CIO)
By the end of the development cycle, we had to make decisions regarding retail box. Our publisher sent us box cover art, and boy, we had so much to say. Turned out we were short on time and most of our remarks ended up in “can’t be done now” category.
Sometime in that period, we managed to rent a much bigger office, where we had so much space that we didn’t know what to do with it, but we knew we liked it! So we brought even more people aboard, to prepare working on XBOX edition that will include both TFE and TSE. But that is another story…
Here are few pics and concept art from that era, hope you’ll enjoy them
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.
Just in time for a Christmas surprise – we are proud to present you fast paced arcade action FPS and best VR experience ever – Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter.
The game is released on Steam Early Access and is available at 10% off for the first week. But that’s not all! There’s an additional 10% discount for owners of Serious Sam HD: TFE and 20% for owners of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope which makes it for a maximum total discount of whooping 40%. Yaaaay! (no, you won’t get a set of knives with it)
Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter is a full locomotion game with the smooth trackpad movement for the brave ones, built-in teleportation system to dodge the enemies and plain teleport with aiming for entry-level VR players. It features single player and a multiplayer mode which includes up to 16 players in various cooperative and versus modes. Deathmatch included. And that one is a blast!
Double the gun, double the fun and gain the courage to oppose Mental because your ultimate goal is to stop him once and for all. Travel back through time to ancient Egypt and fight against various enemies in what is considered to be one of the most visually enjoyable VR experiences.
Since the game is released in Early Access expect major upgrades, tweaks, and bugfixes soon.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rHWGCrjGI[/embedyt]
Together with our friends and publishers Devolver Digital we can announce the first major update for Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope – online cooperative game mode, now available on Steam Early Access.
The new co-op mode allows for two players to play campaign online. This puts players side by side inside the VR simulation of Captain Sam’s combat logs with each player controlling one of two virtual-but-deadly versions of Sam Stone to deliver double the damage on Mental’s hordes of enemies. Players can jump in and start doling out destruction via either HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. Now you can finally blast those enemies with your best friend!
In addition to that, players can choose between two new difficulty settings: Tourist and Serious, both in single player and co-op mode.
Follow us on our social channels @Croteam and Croteam Facebook for more updates.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gf7TloICN4[/embedyt]
Need a gift for your Serious Samantha? Are you looking to surprise your basic pleasure model replicant? Or would you rather buy something nice just for yourself? And what if we’re all just androids?
Find answers here: http://merch.croteam.com/
