nikola - Croteam

AaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAAnd we’re out now!

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is now live on Steam Early Access (http://store.steampowered.com/app/465240/).

The game was first shown outside of Croteam’s studio as a pre-alpha demo at Reboot Develop 2016. It was announced at E3, and demoed at Gamescom, PAX and EGX, with everybody who tried it coming away wanting more, and wanting it soon. Like, yesterday!

So first of all we’d like to say thank you to all our fans who made this possible and encouraged us to make our vision come true – to travel the galaxy, meet interesting aliens, and blow the shit out of them all in a mind-blowing, fast-paced, guns-blazin’ virtual reality environment. The journey has just started and Early Access means that we’ll listen to your feedback to make the best game possible.

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope works with HTC Vive out of the box, while support for Oculus Rift + Touch controls is planned for hardware’s release. But there’s no reason to wait: Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is 20% off this week!

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UHykMkH-VQ[/embedyt]

Monday, October 17, 2016

This is Real – Croteam

We had some friends from HTC Vive over, we chatted about VR and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, and they made a nice video that day. If we seem overly enthusiastic in the video, that’s because we are excited, very much so! The game will hit Early Access in on Monday, October 17th and we can’t wait – that’s just a few days from today!

In fact, we’re so excited that we dropped our perfect accent and we’re keepin’ it real. 😛

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWOey9KovuM[/embedyt]

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

The cat is (not) a lie

“At the time we were working on a poster for the The Talos Principle, the game still wasn’t finished and there was supposed to be a story of a cat, or even a game mechanic involving a cat”. This is how Denis Ivankovic begins to answer one of the most frequent questions in Croteam‘s inbox – “What’s with the cat?”

“Later on, the whole cat part of the story got scrapped, but we still wanted the poster to communicate the idea of an android with feelings, which is obviously a human trait, and hence hint at the whole premise of the game. The initial mock up of the poster looked very promising, but now we were one cat short, story wise, so we went on and tried to replace it with the rabbit.”

“The problem is there wasn’t a rabbit in the game as well, so the whole cat or rabbit dilemma was basically a chicken and the egg situation. At the end, we went with the cat as Helena (Level Designer) actually had one. Well, her mother did, his name was Rudolf.”

So, the poster features a cat, but the cat is not in the game? The whole thing is a lie!?

“No, not at all!” Denis reassures us. “The game features a secret level with a cat! I’m not saying anything more, as the cat’s location is carefully hidden in the game. And in about bazillion game guides available on the Internet.”

While the cat is not a lie, the part with nine lives sadly is. Rudolf had an accident and is no longer with us, but his memory lives on.

To finish this blog on a more positive vibe, we’re giving away free The Talos Principle merch! All you have to do is post a picture that involves The Talos Principle and a (live) cat. Check out our Facebook page for more.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Try out a single level from The Talos Principle in VR

I wonder, what would the world of The Talos Principle look like in VR? Actually, I don’t, since we recreated a level from The Talos Principle in Destinations VR Workshop!

It’s free and it’s available for download today, you can try it out right now:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/453170/

Just install the Destinations and subscribe to The Talos Principle (and than restart the Steam, lol).

In the meantime, can you guess which screenshots are from the actual game using Serious Engine, and which are recreated in Source 2 engine?

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

We’re at the Nordic Game conference

If you've seen this lecture, you haven't seen them all; Alen speeches continue to be an inspiration for developers . It is, however, going to look a bit like this, but with more mooses. And swag.

If you’ve seen this lecture, you haven’t seen them all; Alen’s speeches continue to be an inspiration for developers . It is, however, going to look kind of like this. But with more elks. And swag.

Ok, we’re not there yet, but we’re traveling to Malmo, Sweeden. Our CTO, Alen Ladavac, will be at the Nordic Game conference 2016 soon, giving a lecture on making big games with small teams – The Talos Principle post-mortem.

Croteam has always tried to optimize the development process and attain high production values with a small but effective team. This post-mortem of the critically acclaimed The Talos Principle describes the principles, tools and processes used to achieve that.

If you’re at Nordic, come and listen, or get in touch with us. This Friday. Noon. Sharp. See you there!

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Returning home… a Hero!

“For us? You really shouldn’t have… -I love you, guys! – The pleasure is mine. -No, it’s all mine. -No. Mine.”

“Amazing! Exquisite! Huge!” were some of the superlatives the organizer of the Reboot Develop 2016 used to describe his conference. And guess what? It was all of that – and more. Three sunny days in beautiful Split, more than 80 speakers, 800 attendees, and six awards:

Visual Excellence – Shadows of War (TRI.G)
Outstanding Gameplay – Qube 2 (Toxic Games)
Special Selection – Morning Men (Pixel Federation)
Game of the Year – Qube 2 (Toxic Games)
Hero Award – Charles Cecil
Street Hero Award – Croteam

We’d like to congratulate everybody that won, console everybody who was nominated but didn’t win, but most of all – we are going to brag about our award, the Street Hero!

The award was introduced just this year and came as quite a surprise (that’s why we are sporting our street smarts at the awards ceremony and not wearing tuxedos). Initially we thought it was for eating the most at the hotel bar or winning the Develop football cup (yup! It was Croteam), but we got separate awards for those achievements. An extra charge at the hotel bill for the first one, and a nice golden cup for the second one.

Apparently, Street Hero has something to do with being a cool regional developer and an all-around nice studio. And that’s us, in a nutshell. Tnx, Reboot! See you next year.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Do you want to meet with Croteam? (It doesn’t have to be with Croteam)

How would you like to meet with Croteam? Like, all of us? At the same time?

Now’s your chance: we’re going to Reboot Develop 2016 next week – and you should too. You should be able to instantly recognize us – we’re tall, dark, but we’re no strangers. Just wave at us, preferably while sitting at the bar, and we’ll gladly join you to discuss everything and anything. As long as you’re buying.

Another tip for spotting a member of Croteam: most of us will be wearing company issued red T-Shirts (pro tip: it says Croteam on front. And back). But enough with the serious stuff, here’s where the fun starts. Some of are speakers too!

Check this out:
Dean Sekulić will be talking about how his team of GPU wizards was able to bring Vulkan support to The Talos Principle. To make things more interesting, The Talos Principle was the first game to support Vulkan, ever (and even more interesting: we say “team”, but basically it’s just Dean).

Damjan Mravunac has been at the helm of Croteam’s music department for the past 15 years, so it’s supposed to be a lecture, but you never know with this guy – it MIGHT be a musical! Damjan is also Croteam’s CMO, and he should be able to recount the company’s history in the form of a song – like a true bard does!

Davor Tomičić is another member of the studio that is very, very excited about Reboot Develop! This year, Croteam’s co-founder and The Talos Principle designer has gone out of his way to share the naked truth of game development. In addition to his public talk, you’ll also be able to schedule a very exclusive 1-on-1 session and hear him talk – just for you! You can look for him in the spa.

Goran Adrinek, Croteam’s programer, will be sharing his tips and tricks on AI navigation. The talk is suitable for both aspiring and experienced programers, but that’s not all! Even if you are a total beginner, Goran’s lecture will instantly turn you into a programing master in less than an hour.*
(*May or may not be entirely true.)

It’s not just us – there will be A LOT of interesting industry people at Reboot Develop 2016. Come mingle!

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Bugs in our code? No waaaay….

Serious Engine v1.10 source code was released just recently, but it already provoked the interest of a large number of developers.

Among the developers was a company Program Verification Systems, that used it’s static code analyzer to analyze the Serious Engine v1.10 code.

Their findings? Well, apparently there are “bugs in the code” and “suspicious code fragments”, but Croteam’s official stance on this matter remains that we write and develop a perfect code!

For example, PVS-Studio analyzer claims that it found typos and that there are identical sub-expressions to the left and to the right of the ‘==’ operator. So? One can never be too sure! We were just double checking! Errm, yes, just making sure, that was it. Definitely not a typo.

Further on in the analysis, PVS-Studio analyzer tries to pwn us with another finding: “in this code fragment we get a pointer “pwndView”, which is then assigned with NULL, making the condition always false. Most likely the programmer meant to write the inequality operator ‘!=’”.

While it may be true that the condition is always false, we’re positive that the programmer knew exactly what he (or she) was doing. Which is more than can be said for our PR department (it’s just me on Thursdays, hi!) that would love to further analyze the analyzer (or just use the word extensively) and its findings, but sadly can’t really understand any of that technical stuff.

But if you can, take a look at our careers section – we may have a job for you!

A big thanks goes to Svyatoslav Razmyslov from Program Verification Systems for testing Serious Engine v1.10, writing the article and trying to find bugs. Nice try 😉

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released

Hey guys, today we have a surprise for you. We’re releasing the source code for Serious Engine v1.10! It’s the very same engine that we used for Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and The Second Encounter.

This month we’ll be celebrating Serious Sam’s 15th anniversary and we’re all feeling very nostalgic. Croteam’s Vyacheslav Nikitenko, who worked on the source code and prepared Serious Engine v.1.10 for this release, had this to say:

“Historically, this version of Serious Engine is very important for Croteam and for me personally. I created several mods for Serious Sam back in the day, before even starting the work on the source code, and it was a great tool for learning.

And it’s even better today! Obviously, Serious Engine v1.10 won’t produce top-notch graphics, but the source code is very well commented, easy to modify, and there are lots of user generated mods out there. This version has everything you need to build your own game – or just experiment.

If you’re looking to get started, just download the files from GitHub and head over to SeriousZone, it has a great community and lots of tutorials.”

You can grab the files here:

https://github.com/Croteam-official/Serious-Engine

Friday, March 11, 2016

The Talos Principle BETA support for Vulkan is live

Vulkan is the new graphics API that makes for a great foundation for future games and 3D apps. If you’d like to check it out with The Talos Principle BETA Vulkan support, it’s a good idea to read this forum post first. Croteam’s Senior Programmer, Dean Sekulic, is pretty excited right now (we all are!) and his post is an interesting mix of instructions, disclaimers and a personal dev diary.

With the imminent release, Vulkan is also a hot topic in tech community so we asked Dean just a few questions about bringing Vulkan support to Serious Engine.

In-house interview: Why Vulkan?

Co-founder of Croteam and veteran of the games industry, Dean Sekulic is our graphics engine specialist. He is currently working on Vulkan implementation in Serious Engine.

Serious Engine already works on many different platforms and the general consensus is that it works very well. Why do we need Vulkan?
Vulkan is a great fit for Croteam’s next game, which will require no compromise when it comes to raw performance.

Vulkan wasn’t officially released till today, so how were you able to work on implementation and roll out one of the first titles supporting this new tech?
Croteam is a member of VAP (Vulkan Advisory Panel), and for almost a year we helped with designing the Vulkan API . It was a great idea on part of the Khronos Group to include Croteam and other game developers, because we all know what happens when you let only IHVs design the API: game developers are left with low-level programming of GPU registers. 😉

How would you describe the current state and performance of Vulkan API?
Vulkan has a huge potential! We’re only scratching the surface of what can be done with it, and porting The Talos Principle to Vulkan should be seen as a proof of concept. Of course, Vulkan also requires several changes in the higher level graphics system in Serious Engine and this will come in time…

What is your experience with implementing Vulkan support in an existing game engine and making it work with current technology?
We had great support from both NVIDIA and AMD and the really nice folks in their developer relations department and driver programmers helped us a great deal! All in all, it was a much smoother operation than I anticipated at first, regarding all the classic issues with “hitting a moving target.” Yes, it was quite hard to code support for API while it’s still being changed, but I’m really happy that we went that way so early and also helped in designing the API itself.
Also, I have to point out that we’re not there just yet – some work is left to be done in both low-level and high-level optimizations.

How would you describe your experience with Vulkan in just one sentence?
Vulkan in just one sentence? The endless war between performance and portability is finally over!

Would you be willing to share your experience with Vulkan with other developers?
Absolutely! I’ll be more than happy to share Croteam’s experience, both the advantages and the challenges, on porting an engine from OpenGL or Direct3D to Vulkan. I’ll be giving a lecture about implementing Vulkan in Serious Engine at Reboot Develop 2016 in Croatia in April. Hopefully, I’ll be one of the speakers at the Vulkan panel at GDC 2016 in San Francisco in March, but we’re still in talks about that one.

Monday, February 8, 2016

The Talos Principle at 75% off!

While it may appear that this game is always on some sort of sale, it’s not. It’s just that our marketing team (IT’S ME, THE GUY WHO’S TYPING THIS, HI!) has been kind of lazy when it comes to news updates.

No philosophy to it – get it now, it’s a great game. Don’t take our word for it, check out the reviews.

Friday, February 5, 2016

The Talos Principle will support Vulkan – first screenshot released

There seems to be a lot of media interest for Croteam’s support of Vulkan API in existing and upcoming games, especially after this comment on a forum.

We asked Dean Sekulic, Croteam’s Senior Programmer, to confirm the story.

“Yes, it’s true. The Talos Principle will be our first game to support the Vulkan API. The game is already available on PC, PS4, OS X, Linux and even Android, so I thought – why not add Vulkan to Serious Engine? I mean, it was the easiest feature ever, it only took me five minutes or so to implement it. Here, take a look.”

After seeing the first screenshot we weren’t quite convinced that was the support Khronos Group is looking for. We confronted Dean about it and asked him if he read the official specifications at all?

“No. Of course not! But it won’t stop me from speaking about it at this years GDC official Vulkan panel. And if you disagree, I’ll be available for questions after my lecture.”

Dean was equally straightforward about the time frame for the upcoming patch that will add Vulkan functionality:

“Soon.”

We were terrified to ask anything else. But YOU could try.

Friday, February 5, 2016

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