What did you use LightWave for in Serious Sam?

On Serious Sam: The First Encounter and SS: The Second Encounter I did all the modelling, UV mapping and most of the animation. On Serious Sam for Xbox, guys from our Art department managed UV mapping and some modelling.

Why did you use LightWave, when other 3D packages are better known for games work?

At the time it was most affordable program for a small team like ours was. Also, we started development on Amiga and as we moved to PC platform, LightWave was the right choice.

Why did you start your own game and game engine, when the PC games market has quite a few games of that nature (FPS) already?

We are based in Croatia, not a country that's well-known for gaming. We had no external funds to buy a licence for either game or engine and that's why we, when we switched from Amiga-based development to PC, decided to make our own game and engine.

Compared to all other gaming engines, an FPS engine was the toughest one to make (we like challenges!) and since we are all gamers, FPS were games which we played the most. Also, after we made the design for the game, we realised that the engines on the market at that time couldn't handle what we wanted to do, another reason for our own Serious Engine.

Can users make models for Serious Sam with LightWave?

Yes, all the tools and documentation along with several examples are located on game's CD. We have a large community and forums at http://www.seriouszone.com with people willing to help in modelling/animation, texture making and so on.

We are working on Serious Sam 2 at the moment (using LW of course).

How many people work at CroTeam, and how many use LightWave?

Curently, we have 19 people (programmers, artists and level designers). Recently we acquired 16 additional licences of LightWave 7.5. All our artists use LightWave for modelling, animation, texturing and special stuff like backgrounds, special effects and prototyping levels. With the new Engine and Tools in work, Level editors are using LightWave to model and texture templates (architecture, decorations, environments) and import them into our new Engine. Our programmers also have active knowledge of LightWave because they are writing plug-ins and tools either for exporting data to our game format or writing plug-ins/tools we need for work. Basically we currently have 14 people working with LightWave on our new game.

Thanks for your time Admir and when can we look forward to Serious Sam 2?

I can't give you an exact date on SS2, but Take2 (Rockstar Games) will be publishing it.

To find out more about Serious Sam, or to download the demo of the game, visit: http://www.serioussam.com/