I’d love to hear a bit more about Serious Sam 4. I know you’ve talked about how the terrain now is for being generated, are there any more details that you can tell us about that?
Alen Ladavac: We haven’t yet started talking publicly about what’s going on in the game. We released some info back when we started the Steam page and announced it last year, and now we decided to share this terrain tech because we thought it would be interesting in general for the game development community, but also give a glimpse of what was going on in there. But we haven’t yet started seeing any promotion and discussing what the game is about. So basically, what you got in our Reboot Develop 2019 talk is what we can show for now.
Has the new terrain technology sped up the process of creating internally?
AL: Yes, from one perspective, this is something we’ve been waiting for a long time. Internally we should really have a terrain engine because artists used to manually model terrain meshes, like in The Talos Principle. They’ve been complaining about it for a long time. And we wanted to do some larger vistas for Serious Sam 4. There were several other reasons why we started. When we started we just built some technical solutions, but they turned out to be working better than we expected. I was really, really happy with the results.
So can we expect to see the similar technology in games going forward, other than Serious Sam 4?
AL: Of course. I mean, that’s always our goal, having an engine and then using it, like right now, where we are not only using technology for newer games but hopefully bring the older games to the newer technology and keep shipping them on different platforms.
DL: We shipped The Talos Principle on Xbox One just a few months ago, and most of our upcoming projects are going to be multi-platform because we keep adding support to our engine for various platforms. That was always the case with Croteam. This has always been Alen’s engine and then the team just kept building on it. We’re could’ve switched to a different engine at any point in time. That probably would have been easier for us but it wouldn’t be as fun and as flexible.
How is the engine working with the console platforms at the moment?
AL: Really good. We are happy with that. Yeah. It’s become very streamlined to just ship one of our games on Xbox One or PS4 or Nintendo Switch. We are working on all of those platforms to make sure that we can at any point ship any game is. As long as that platform can actually handle the amount of content, we’re probably not gonna ship the next big game older platform. But in theory, the engine supports a number of platforms.
So then the engine is working well with the Nintendo Switch?
AL: We are working on porting for the Nintendo Switch. I’m not sure what’s the current status and what we can share about that.
DL: We won’t share much, but it works.
Can we expect The Talos Principle to hit the Switch?
DL: Likely.
wccftech.com
