The first area is an exterior view of the city of Pompeii with the volcano in the background. And *naturally* the second area is in the volcano itself! Turns out that the evil Mental's henchmen have built massive power sucking devices which hover over the lava and aborb the heat, transferring the energy through time to the Big Bad himself! Sam's job isn't so much to disable the devices, but rather make his way through this area to the final boss.
Early construction of the Pompeii exterior area. Art is still being tweaked, plus there's no cool enemies shown yet! |
Currently I'm finishing up art I had roughed in before, Hamdija is still working on music tracks, Richard is coding background effects, and AJ is tweaking story elements and dialog.
What's in the Pompeii area? Well not to spoil everything but the enemies in final levels are more consistently BIG. As in, giant, walking caterpillar as big a building BIG. A caterpillar that stands up and acts like a massive wall. And has 3 different guns. And has a detachable head. Yeah, it all makes sense in the game. Serious sense.
Serious Sam games are famous for the fun secrets, and we're working to make some great ones. We wanted to make sure you get the most enjoyment out of those unique secrets. To that end, we're also implementing a special Secrets Menu. Instead of the typical version of completing a level and seeing you found 4/7 secrets, now you'll be able to look any time at this menu and see any level you've been in, and all the secrets you've found. There will be the full name and full description of each secret.
Secret cave from Serious Sam The First Encounter |
And we're even looking at a way for you to visit them! For instance, if you find one of the 'comedy secrets' and really want to show a friend, you can just open the Secrets Menu, find that secret and click 'Visit' and you'll be loaded into the level just before the funnies. Still working out the kinks but so far it's pretty cool.
And then there's installation, localization and all that fun stuff. Oh and still the final boss. So we're close, but still a little ways to go. But we're getting there!