Croteam | Uncategorized

… it’s turns out to be fun!

The good folks over from ASUS Republic of Gamers came to visit us a couple of weeks back. Kimberly and Jason had a chance to try out all our current VR projects and were completely blown away by the immersive and intense experiences they offer. Soon after that they started chatting to a few of our own, including our Alen Ladavac, Ante Vrdelja, Damjan Mravunac, Dean Sekulić and Nikola Mosettig, which let them find out first hand why we love VR and why we are willing to dwell in this alternate world.

If you want to know yourself, have a look at their freshly released article “Inside Croteam, the game studio going all-in on Virtual Reality“. Enjoy!

As you all probably know, the Croteam VR team has been hard at work on the big Arcadia update for Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. This new update is all but done, and while there is some polishing left to do, we’re so confident that we can officially announce the release window which will be the first week of June – so pretty soon.

Arcadia is equally green and lush as it is gray and desolate. It hides a danger unlike any other that you’ve seen before, so Sam has got to use every single one of his big guns to battle against tons of enemies – five of them new! Of course, Arcadia will be released with full co-op support, because blasting alien scum to bits is always more rewarding with friends.

What’s that? Will Arcadia be the final update to TLH, you ask? Why no, no it won’t. We’ve got some cool new surprises in store for you, but you’ll have to wait for more info on that. 🙂

In the meantime, how about a guessing game? Which new weapon will help Mr. Stone in his Arcadia adventures? Which one would you like to see in all it’s VR glory? Let us know on Twitter.

Hi guys!

We’ve got some great news for you today. We have started the internal testing phase of the big Valtos update coming to Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope. 

As we mentioned before, this update will send mr. Stone to a new planet, Valtos, where he will battle across four gorgeous but extremely deadly locations. 

Along with aforementioned new locations the Valtos update brings three new powerful weapons, including a bow (explosive arrows included!). You will use these toys to annihilate new types of enemies and a new boss.

We are very excited to see you play through this amazing new content, which you will be able to do in just under two weeks time – on Wednesday, April 26th – so stay tuned.

It’s been a great day so far. Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope and Serious Sam VR Bundle are currently on 3rd, 4th and 7th place on Steam VR Top Sellers List. This is truly a great success for us and our VR team.

Big thanks to all our fans who are supporting us all these years and playing our games.

We are preparing more surprises for you soon so be up to date with all the news on our social media channels.

Stay serious and play Serious Sam!

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.

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.

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:

[Read More]

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.