Serious Sam 2 – Developer Interview
Serious Sam 2 – Developer Interview
Dean Sekulic and Admir Elezovic – Croteam
Right, we’ve covered Serious Sam 2 in some detail so far, with loads of screens, bad guys screens and even NPC biogs. Having spent so much time drooling over the screens, I got to see some playable code and also had a chat with developers Dean Sekulic and Admir Elezovic.
At the time of writing, Serious Sam 2 is ready to go gold for the X-Box version and is roughly a month away from completion for the PC version. Both versions will be released simultaneously ‘when they’re ready’… which hopefully means in time for Christmas.
Watching the game in action, it’s obvious that all the hallmarks of the Serious Sam series are here with large, open landscapes, brightly coloured enemies and buckets of mindless shooting action… Yep, Sam is still just as frenetic as ever. There are some new additions, both in the form of the bad guys you’ll be up against as well as how you’ll be able to dispatch them.
This time around, Sam can use handily placed turrets to take out baddies from afar, but of course, these turrets are enormous cannons which Sam has to straddle to be able to aim… fun with the recoil, I’m sure. Sam can climb in a variety of vehicles, as well, to help him take out some of the roughly 40 enemies in the game. Admir told me that originally they had over 70 enemies, some of which have only been cut in the last few weeks… they’re certainly a creative lot over there.
Now you’ll already have read about the NPCs in SS2 and how some of them help you, with a little questioning, Dean and Admir told me a little more about them. The basic story is that the you’re still chasing after Mental, who has enslaved the inhabitants of 5 worlds, subjugating them to his will. The only thing that can destroy him is a magical medallion, which has been broken into five pieces, with a piece hidden on each world. The NPCs are now protecting these pieces, waiting for your arrival where you have to help them drive off the baddies before claiming the piece and moving on to the next world.
Croteam have been working very hard on the Serious Engine 2 to bring Sam and all his goodness to life, with a complex physics engine built in to enable some cool effects such as tumble rocks, barrels floating in a river current and so on. Ragdoll models are in place as well, so wasted bad guys will (un)happily tumble down a cliff face when you blow them away. Being an in-house proprietary engine, there’s no support for PhysX cards as these are based on the Agiea physics engine instruction set, and the Croteam guys have started from scratch with their own engine.
What they have done is to create a fully destructible world, where, if the designer has seen fit to do allow it, you can destroy everything you see. Obviously, there are limits to some of the stuff you’ll be able to blow up as you might perchance need to enter that house you’re bombarding with rockets, but in places where there’s nothing mission critical, Dean and Admir happily showed off what happens when you finally waste one of the big bad guys… towering over the others, he collapses in a heap, destroying houses and trees beneath him, the knock on effect taking out more bad guys and objects with the scattering debris.. nice.
The multiplayer mode for Serious Sam 2 will include the superb co-op game, with the enemy numbers ramping up for the number of players in the game and of course you’ve got straight deathmatch to play with too. The single player game will have two modes as well. There’s the normal mode where you just play through the game as normal. Then there’s the arcade mode. This gives you just three lives, with an extra life earned every 10,000 points. The idea here is to rack up a high score before losing all your lives. Of course, you can then restart where you lost your last life and carry on with a new set of three lives but your score will be back to zero… with the high score table being the thing to beat!
Just as impressive as the game itself is the game editor that will be shipping with Serious Sam 2. This is a seriously impressive bit of software, designed to be as accessible as possible and allow you to make your own Serious Sam maps and levels. One very useful feature of the editor is the simulation mode. This allows you to jump from creating a level straight into playing it, without having to exit the editor or load up the game itself. This makes play testing a doddle as you can then pause the game, edit it some more and then re-enter the game to see how your changes look.
Dean showed this off to great effect by loading up a level and then pausing it once he’d attracted three centaurs. He then paused the game, picked the centaurs up and shuffled them around before moving Sam to a new position too and then re-entering the level to show off the changes. Having an easy to use editor like this will be a gift to the modding community and should garner a large online fan base as more multiplayer and single player maps will be made by fans with as little effort as possible.
Serious Sam 2 is slated for a WHENEVER release.
