Ars Technica War Stories - Serious Sam: Saved by a Vertical Slice - [rhythmic bass drums] - Hello, I am Davor Hunski. I am the Chief Creative Officer at Croteam and I will tell you a story of how creating a vertical slice saved Serious Sam. [island drums] Back in the days, 90's in Croatia, were a little bit less exciting than today. But, still, there was a few very enthusiastic people trying to make their first games. There were, like, three or four companies in their garages trying to make games. Just, you know, pure passion, and that was not much more than that. We really believed that we can deliver something very special. [island drums] [suspenseful music] When we decided to make a first-person shooter game, we needed an engine to run it. But engines in those days were pretty expensive. I think it was, like, more of like $1 million-plus and of course we couldn't afford an engine of $1,000, probably. Actually, we had no choice but to make ourselves our own engine. Our goal was to make a 2D engine that would be able to run a game like Wolfenstein that had no view up and down look, just a feeling of a first-person perspective and you can move around, and we did that. But in the meantime, Duke Nukem came and it had up and down perspective and you can look a little bit up and down. And we had to switch that, and we added that to the engine. Then, of course, Quake came and that was unbelievable. Complete 3D, and we knew that we wouldn't be able to deliver a game that doesn't have 3D, and the end of the game was not near on the end of the horizon, so we understand that we need to still need to step once again and do the complete 3D game. And then, of course, accelerators came and we need to switch from the software version of 3D into the accelerated one. During the development of Serious Sam one, the most common processor was probably the Pentium One or even Pentium Two, maybe. We optimized the engine so that it could run on low-end machines, too. We know that we need to step up. We needed to do something very special, and it was a complete engine with editors with physics, with complete 3D, to support a huge number of enemies because that was our goal, to have the game that is open, wide spaces, something very special and new. Games at that time actually had something like few enemies actually on the screen, and probably max up to 10. But we aimed for 10 times more. Actually, we aimed to reach 100 enemies on the screen at once. And, when you add to that the amount of projectiles that those enemies fire, and you have to fire in a really rapid rate to be able to destroy all of them, and that was, like, really, really challenging for us to achieve technically. To gain what we want to achieve in the game, that's huge environments and a huge number of enemies, we had to deliver something that wasn't actually seen anywhere, and that's really large scope for the environments. That means that, that your visibility, you would be able to see something like maybe even several hundreds of meters, even one kilometer ahead. The first implementation didn't have a good enough performances, so we had to invent some systems that would enable us to run hundreds, actually hundreds of enemies at the same time, with them shooting projectiles which are really fast and you know, like, on computers that are really really not that good at those times. So, we invented this caching ahead system, where one projectile or moving object would actually cache for, I don't know, maybe three or four seconds ahead, everything that it could collide and until nothing changed during those three, four seconds, it wouldn't have to test again against an environment for collision. To speed up the collision, we were not able to use real geometry of cubes for collision. But we approximated them with several spheres. On the one side, it speeded up immensely our collision tests, because actually a test with a cube is a really, really easy one. And the second gain that we got is that we could have multidirectional gravities so characters would be able to walk on ceilings, inside the spheres, so we had several types of gravity and we actually put that into the game as a secret places location, and that was really, really awesome. We started with building a complete game that was unpolished but had, like, 40 levels. And we packed that up with menus, nice menus, and everything into one pitchable... Well, we thought it was a pitchable that we recorded and actually printed out a very nice game design document that explains all the enemies, all the items, weapons, locations, story, everything. We sent it to something like, maybe, 20, 30 publishers, and we pitched that demo along with a game design document to all of them. We only had answers from two of them. So 28 didn't answer at all. And two answers came and both of them said no. [island drums] We didn't have too much options on our table. So, we wanted to do our last try to make this happen. We had no funding at all, so we were like students working in our garages, fighting with our parents, because they didn't understand what we wanted to do with this. But still we knew we have something special there, okay? And we tried to think and we discussed many times what to do now, how to deliver to others what we had inside our brains, in our minds. So we created, we decided that we would make one, let's call it a vertical slice, one technology test demo that would feature, really polished, one level, but really, really polished level from the beginning to the end. We took one of our beloved levels, the Karnak level, that is inspired by the really, really beautiful complex of temples in Egypt, and we planned to have several pits, pitfalls on levels, some introductions of the enemies. We really give our best to polish everything in the game. Animation sounds, weapon sounds, feeling of running, everything. It was like a demo that would be played like from one hour to one-and-a-half hours. It's a complete game compressed down to one level. We upload it onto the internet, but the real success of the demo was because the site Old Man Murray picked it up and gave it a first positive review ever, because they always gave negative reviews. The Old Man Murray was a very famous site. It was run by two guys, Chet and Erik, and those guys later were employed by Valve, and they were writers of Portal, Half-Life 2, and Left 4 Dead games. Guys from the Old Man Murray actually had this ratings system where they would take a game and measure how long does it take for a player to reach the first crate or barrel in a game. It was a way for the guys to show how unimaginative the level design in the other games. So, they picked up our demo, and actually there weren't any crates in the game, so they gave us a fantastic and first positive ever review, probably. And that put a lot of spotlight onto our game and I think in the end that made a big difference. It was really heavily downloaded from many people. It was like more than a million downloads. It was the download of the summer back in the days. And it was really, really successful. [island drums] We think that this vertical slice or making a demo that would represent the game is actually a very, very good way to start making a new game. So we did that for Serious Sam 3. We had this level called Philae, it is an island on the river Nile, where we actually created the first gameplay. When we created Talos, we had a special level that was actually, we published it, we gave it out for free so the people can test and see what the Talos is all about and we were pretty confident that they would like that, and actually that happened. And I think this is pretty fair for the developers to give a game in hands of the gamers to try out before they buy. So, yeah, well, it is not as common these days, but I really think it's fair and we will, I think we will stick to that decision in the future. [haunting pipes]