Croteam Interview on GamePlay |
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By Earthling - May 14, 2007 |
Not to infringe any copyrights, we will only report the most important information. For the rest, if you are living in Croatia or one of the neighboring countries, be sure to get the magazine, as it contains a lot more information. Having just read the interview, I can say that this is without a doubt the best gaming interview I have ever read, and this isn't fandom speaking. Apart from all the information related to Croteam and their games, you will find an extensive and deep look at the workings of the gaming industry, as well as the state of gaming and game developers in Croatia. I have chosen to take Croteam's answers from the interview and directly translate them to English as literally as possible. The reason is that I do not wish misinformation to spread, because nobody will benefit from that. I have concentrated on Croteam and their games here, because that is of direct interest to Seriously! and the Serious Sam fans. Having said that, I'll finally get to the point: The interview was done by Damir Durovic, executive editor of the GamePlay magazine, who interviewed Davor Hunski - CCO, Alen Ladavac - CTO and Roman Ribaric - CEO of Croteam. Asked about the plans for their projects, Davor Hunski says among other things:
... About the plans for Serious Sam sequels and other projects, [Serious Sam 3] is being worked on, as well as the other project. The official public statement by the publisher will also be out soon. As for the new Serious Sam, you can be certain it will be the best sequel of Serious Sam when it's done...Later on, Hunski adds:
...Once the new Serious Sam sequel is out, you can bet it will be the best in the series and worked on with unseen passion. I honestly hope it will see the ligth of day soon. And when it does, it will be great.Speaking about the planetary success of Serious Sam, Roman Ribaric said:
... At the time [of launch of Serious Sam] there was an announcement by Nike Wilson, director of the publisher Gathering of Developers, in which he apologized to all fans that they had not anticipated such a demand for Serious Sam and they would immediately make more copies.Speaking about strategies and goals for the future, the writer mentions that one of the options is that Croteam would be bought by one of the big publishers, and that they have already received a few offers, all of which were refused. An option Ribaric mentions is
… that we gather the rest of the small developers in Croatia and then try to present ourselves to the outside in a strong union or cluster, whatever you wish to call it. I believe there is a good amount of market space to take over the development of big games, ones which produce revenues in the range of a few hundred million dollars to the publishers. There is no reason that our union could not do that, if not for the first title, then after it. I am not speaking of MMOs here, which produce even higher revenues, but they are not out of the question either. We believe there is enough knowledge, creativity and infrastructure to do this. Also, our contacts and co-operation with Sony, Microsoft, ATi/AMD, Intel and nVidia show that there is space for something like that.Games as art has been a big topic of debate for years, and a perspective that is gaining more support every day. Davor offers us his perspective on this, saying that game development is a combination of art, science and craft:
There is always a dose of creativity which is a property of every kind of art. People who make high-poly models really know their job and have an eye for detail and art. [...] New approaches to math, new algebra, the most difficult forms of integrating curves, essence of the structure of materials and behavior of the light are common in modern programming. [...] Games are also a form of craft, because experience in development is extremely important. New designers overcome tools for making games relatively quickly, but to become a master, it takes a lot of experience...The interview also talks about Croteam's new unannounced project. Although there is not a lot of information about it (it may be officially announced by the publisher in the coming weeks), what is there gives us basic insight into the genre and style of the game:
What we can say for now is that it's a 'military tactical-action shooter', which is powered by our Serious Engine 3 technology. The game is set in the present; with 'in your face' action and requiring gamers to think before shooting. The technology allows the player the impression that he is at the very heart of the action. Audio-visual components of the game will encompass modern warfare using realistic, bloody and violent moments together with 'fast-paced' action. Using the Serious Engine 3, the game will have a lot of detail, from realistic metal materials, to the 'cloth' system to animated character faces.Finally we come to one of the most interesting parts of the interview where Roman talks about the future of game development in Croatia. As an example, he talks about Croteam's meeting with id Software at E3 last year:
I believe other Croatian developers will read this, so here's an example which they may find interesting. Last year at E3 we had a meeting with Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software. Our wish was that if there was a project they had available, and knowing they had been following our work for some time and had begun working with other developers on their games, that we worked with them. We were told that they were interested, but there were other big developers from the USA which had the same wish. Basically it was agreed that we would make a visual demo of the engine which would show our current knowledge of the technology, as well as some development and artwork. After the agreement was made, a meeting was held in Zagreb with three main developers from id, Tim Willits, Kevin Cloud and Marty Stratton. They had been decided as leaders for a specific project, a sequel to one of id’s existing games. It is common knowledge that working with id doesn't come that easily, which means we were one of the selected few candidates. Although we were close to getting the project, in the end a team from the USA got it. As per their own words, two reasons decided why we didn't get the project. The first reason was the location, in other words possible difficulties in communicating due to time zones and long travel time of their producers from America to Croatia. The second reason was our small number of artists and designers. The stress wasn't on the quality, but rather the total number of people in the team. They deemed we didn't have enough people to make an AAA game by their standards, and we didn’t manage to convince them there was talent here. The point of this example is that there's always someone better than you, that you shouldn't hesitate to offer to work for those better than you, and that there aren't a lot of [game developers] in Croatia...That's it for the interview. The interview itself is accompanied by a lot of pictures showcasing Serious Engine 3, and content from the games. At the time of writing this I got no response from the GamePlay magazine, so I did not make scans of the pictures inside. But as a short description, there are pictures of weapons, enemies, environments, all with an incredible amount of detail. The ones meant to depict reality look so believable that it the only reason you know they're not real is the fact that you are reading a game magazine. In light of this I will also add that they have very faithful recreations of parts of Zagreb and small coastal towns specific to Croatian architecture.
In either case, stay tuned, because more will hopefully follow in the next few days. As always, Seriously! will be there to make sure you are up-to-date with all of the information available.
-- Gimli