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[Hipshot]

Hi everyone!

So we just settled on our next project after Hammerwatch, it's a Serious Sam title called Serious Sam: Bogus Detour, or Serious Sams Bogus Detour, SSBD.



There aren't too many details I can give you at the moment, but it's gonna be a pure action game with designed levels and I really hope we can get the netcode so good that we can properly do versus this time - a feature hammerwatch was missing. I want the campaign to be 3-4 hours long and fully playable in coop.

I also want to say that I'm really glad we get the chance to work with someone else's IP, it's an opportunity for us. I hope we can get this game done before next Christmas.

The level graphics and monsters in that screen are made by our new guy (we're 3 people now), Christian, I created the level and lit it in our editor.

Just before posting this, I created graphics for all powerups =) I love these little items.




I'm gonna write more about the new engine, story, strange name etc a little later!

Good night!

[Hipshot]

Myran, the coder is writing a completely new engine from scratch, using c++ instead of c#, we hope this move will give us a stronger and better engine for future use. Handling of assets in the editor is already much stronger than it ever was.

Trying to reduce the amount of things needed to be hardcoded into the engine and move a lot of things out to Angelscript, so it will be easier to mod the game. Modding in this engine is supposed to be much stronger than in the previous engine, where in Hammerwatch, you couldn't really change fundamentals of how the game worked and you couldn't mod things outside of your own custom level.

---

So story and name then. I didn't know where to place this game, before or after the first game, so I figured I'll just place the story "inside" the first game (this is of course non-canon).
I've read up on the stories of the other non Croteam Serious Sam games and figured that it shouldn't be too difficult getting a basic plotline working that would work with a clean and basic action game w/o getting in the way of the gameplay.

At least for now, I know where it starts - Sam takes a detour from his regular path, somewhere between Metropolis and the Alley of Sphinxes, and travels west through several levels and environments, it starts in the Egyptian desert of Prechaching. I want it to end in some kind of alien base environment and in the end, he returns to his regular mission in the first game.

[The Translocator]

This looks *too* awesome. Are you sure it's going to take until next christmas to make it? I'll buy it now. 

[Storsorgen]

Man, I've always liked Serious Sam, and this looks just delightful. Good luck guys!

[Netsu]

Pretty excited for this 

[Hipshot]

Some of the more iconic Serious Sam monsters =)
I have yet to show a Sam himself though =)

These monsters were all present in the first game, Serious Sams First Encounter, but we will use monsters from several different SS-games, like the major plot presence in the game are gonna be alien marines, that were seen in SS2 a lot.

Beheaded Kamikaze


Gnaar


Kleer

[happymonster]

Looks great, the sprites and animations are very nice!

[Swifty]

Those animations look great, and the look of the first level too, nice tiles! Keep it up, I can't wait to see more! Oh and I loved Hammerwatch!

[Hipshot]

When we developed hammerwatch, shadows were static and they never projected up on walls, in the original campaign, you didn't really notice it cause the walls are so dark, but in the desert, it's clearly visible and it look pretty bad as soon as you start to think about it, as can be seen in the picture below:



With this new engine, the shadows are now dynamic and move with the light instead of just being static, we also project them up a bit on the walls, it looks so much better.

Take a peak here:



Here's a small gif

[eyeliner]

Something like Shock Troopers?

Yes, please.

[jmakegames]

I love the art! I've been meaning to pick Hammerwatch up too.

Congratulations!

[DavidCaruso]

Looks pretty interesting, and the art is pretty nice too. I'm guessing the game isn't going to be arcade-style (i.e. short and goal is to clear in one credit) but a mode designed around that could be super cool!

Are the firefights going to take after Sam 3's? Having all your cover destroyed and running around trying to dodge fire, while your own return fire is missing and knocking up huge mounds of dust so that your range of visibility is constantly changing, etc. Obviously it's different because this is an overhead shooter, but yeah.

[Hipshot]

We just made a more finalized version of Sam Stone, currently just holding dual pistols, but our artist is working on a regular shotgun at the moment.

Something like Shock Troopers?

Yes, please.

I never seen that before, I would like to have that kind of action if possible, lot's of effects and such. I liked the idea of how the weapons are displayed on the ground there.

Looks pretty interesting, and the art is pretty nice too. I'm guessing the game isn't going to be arcade-style (i.e. short and goal is to clear in one credit) but a mode designed around that could be super cool!

Are the firefights going to take after Sam 3's? Having all your cover destroyed and running around trying to dodge fire, while your own return fire is missing and knocking up huge mounds of dust so that your range of visibility is constantly changing, etc. Obviously it's different because this is an overhead shooter, but yeah.

No, no coin op shooter. However, we will most likely add a hardcore mode where you play until you die = gameover.

I've thought about all those destructible parts they have in SS3 and I'm fairly sure there will be walls and some covers that you or the enemies can destroy. I'm very much for having like a stack of oil-barrels that explodes, taking down a wall or such.

[happymonster]

That looks brilliant!

[RujiK]

for a 3/4 view game:
  1 lonely sprite, must be a roguelike.
  2 sided sprite, passable
  4 sided sprite, good.
  8 sided sprite, Great!

But how many sides does that red guy have?! It looks like he might be the extremely rare 16 sided sprite?!
Also love the water. The no obvious tiles is a step above.


And a question you may or may not be able to answer, will the gameplay be significantly different from hammerwatch?

[Hipshot]

Ok, so I just made a little test, to see how the game would be with sounds, how it would repeat and such, all sounds and effects are of course temporary, they were also added in Premiere, since we don't have a sound engine yet =)

It's pretty clear that shooting with the pistol sounds very repetitive, adding a reload function will probably help out, it will also make the gun feel better in game.

In the video, one can also see how the controls differ from Hammerwatch, this is a pure twin stick shooter OR, as in this case, mouse controlled movement. See how the cursor controls where the player aims and where the bullet lands.

for a 3/4 view game:
  1 lonely sprite, must be a roguelike.
  2 sided sprite, passable
  4 sided sprite, good.
  8 sided sprite, Great!

But how many sides does that red guy have?! It looks like he might be the extremely rare 16 sided sprite?!
Also love the water. The no obvious tiles is a step above.


And a question you may or may not be able to answer, will the gameplay be significantly different from hammerwatch?

Well, that red guy is actually 8, it's just that he was drawn, eh, a bit to biased towards the S, SW and SE angle... I guess.

And, I think I can give a pretty accurate answer, even if the development's in such a early stage. All games like Hammerwatch AND this one share very similar core mechanics, you can go back to a lot of older games, just look at Gauntlet or Alien Breed for example. You pretty much run around and shoot until you complete the game, then there's variations that extends and makes the experience richer.

The biggest differences between this and Hammerwatch (if you exclude graphics) are that this game uses tons of weapons as pickups instead of having pre-selected unlockable skills that were defined per class. Instead of using money to buy upgrades for your skills, you now gain experience from killing and can when you gain a level, choose between a few upgrades, perks, like in Call of Duty.

So, if you like, the game's not that different in it's core, but then again, I'm not sure any games like these really are that different!

[Savick]

How do you have rights for this? Maybe you already covered it in your OP and I didn't see it, but is this just a fan game that you plan to release as freeware?

[Tuba]

I'm guessing Devolver is hiring indie devs to make some Serious Sam games again? If so, nice of them to allow you guys to talk about the development like this.

Anyway, looks great. Good luck with it

Myran, the coder is writing a completely new engine from scratch, using c++ instead of c#, we hope this move will give us a stronger and better engine for future use. Handling of assets in the editor is already much stronger than it ever was.

I'm curious, what do you mean by "stronger"?

[Hipshot]

How do you have rights for this? Maybe you already covered it in your OP and I didn't see it, but is this just a fan game that you plan to release as freeware?

This is a real Serious Sam named game, that will be sold on steam. We are our own publishers, not Devolver.

I'm guessing Devolver is hiring indie devs to make some Serious Sam games again? If so, nice of them to allow you guys to talk about the development like this.

Anyway, looks great. Good luck with it

Myran, the coder is writing a completely new engine from scratch, using c++ instead of c#, we hope this move will give us a stronger and better engine for future use. Handling of assets in the editor is already much stronger than it ever was.

I'm curious, what do you mean by "stronger"?

We don't mind showing and telling people what we do, at least myself like to look back at development and see how it once looked, what changed and read thoughts from developers. I've done that on several games released that "came" from this site now.

Myran is better suited to talk about the engine, but what I meant, was AFAIK, it will be better performance and it's easier to port to other platforms. Again, Myran knows this better - cause when it comes down to it, I'm just a level designer really.

[Myran]

Myran, the coder is writing a completely new engine from scratch, using c++ instead of c#, we hope this move will give us a stronger and better engine for future use. Handling of assets in the editor is already much stronger than it ever was.

I'm curious, what do you mean by "stronger"?

I'm not exactly sure what he meant by stronger, but since the engine is redesigned with the stuff we learned from the development of Hammerwatch in mind most stuff is going to be better.
For example the asset loading in Hammerwatch had a number of weaknesses that were problematic for us, basically the way we handled resources that depended on other resources (like an actor that depends on a sprite) was by just loading everything in a determined order (first all sprites, then all actors, etc). That worked, but meant we couldn't have circular dependencies, it also meant we couldn't really do threaded loading of files. This has been solved by resolving dependencies in a separate step.
I also added a pre-processor to all text-based resources, which is really nice, so we can define a unit like this:

Code:

<unit slot="actor">
	<behavior class="CompositeActorBehavior">
%if DIFF_EASY
		<int name="hp">5</int>
%else
		<int name="hp">10</int>
%endif
	
		<int name="aggro-range">200</int>

....

It means we have to reload all the resources whenever things like difficulty gets changed, but with the threaded loading that's quite fast anyway.