Sign In

Lost Password

Sign In

Serious Sam: The First Encounter – 16th anniversary today

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.

 

Serious Sam Fusion 2017 beta is live!

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.

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope new update brings whole new episode!

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/

 

 

New update for SSVR: The First Encounter is live

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!

Serious Wednesday update!

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]