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.

Real, brutal, hardcore, kick-ass, next-gen, “finally, THE survival”, – basically everything that hardcore survival player is expecting to get – down to loosing teeth because of lack of vitamin C (or getting short in heated discussions), then asking politely others to give you their healthy teeth, so you can use learned dentist skill of crafting your own dentures – it’s going to be crazy deep in upcoming PC Steam online survival game called SCUM.

SCUM is coming from our friends and ex-Croteamers at Gamepires, published by also our friends at Devolver Digital, where Croteam is producing, co-financing and also helping with the development in photogrammetry and mocap areas.

SCUM also has a Steam page, so go there, wishlist and follow the development! Also, check out the latest video, screens and post comments (and best wishes) in Steam’s discussion forum:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/513710/

This year members of Steam Community will get the chance to nominate their favorite games for Steam Awards. This is the great chance for you to express love for your favorite developers.

Rules are simple. Select the game(s) Serious Sam and/or The Talos Principle, click “Nominate this game for an award” and select a category, the “Test of Time” category for Serious Sam and the “Whoooaaaaaaa, dude!” category for The Talos Principle.

Thank you all for voting.

For more info regarding Steam Awards click here.

Great news people. Steam Autumn Sale has started and that means more great games at affordable prices for you. Our latest game Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is 20% off. For puzzler-lovers, The Talos Principle and Road to Gehenna are 75% off and classic Sam titles are 90% off.

This sounds like a great gaming party.

Offer ends on Tuesday, November 29th.

We are happy to share the news that Croteam is featured on Gamasutra. Great article regarding our team, desires and motivation in creating the games, challenges we are facing in everyday work, how do we relax and have fun and much more is now available on Gamasutra.

Check out the article on http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/285422/Sponsored_Serious_Sams_past_present_and_future.php

Today we are celebrating 5th anniversary of Serious Sam 3: BFE. Wohooo!

Join us on our Steam SS3: BFE page and our Serious Sam Facebook page and share your craziest experiences with SS3: BFE.

Stay serious!

A few days ago we’ve posted detailed article regarding Mixed Reality in Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. If you aren’t familiar with the topic, you can read the article here.

To simplify the set up process one of our programmers Goran Adrinek has made instructional video with captures for setting up the mixed reality in SSVR.

If you are interested into the topic and you want to learn more, feel free to visit active discussion about Mixed Reality at Steam Community SSVR page.

Reboot InfoGamer 2016 is behind us and we are getting ready for the new challenges and adventures.

In the meantime check out this great video from Reboot made by Croteam staff.

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!

Hello guys. We are having a lot of fun at Reboot InfoGamer so come and join us at our booth. We are presenting Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope on both HTC Vive and Oculus so this is your chance to step into the game and become a true hero Sam “Serious” Stone at least for a day.

Show is open until Sunday, November 13th.