Welcome to the Christmas episode of "Featured Mod" series!
Today we will spotlight Spy's Cr3ed's Christmas themed campaign: "Winter Wonderland"!
Winter Wonderland takes place in an alternate timeline where Serious Sam did not manage to find the Holy Grail so he had to continue his adventures through the snowy world of Winter Wonderland.
The campaign has just been updated this Winter, getting many quality of life improvements such as visual updates, enhanced boss fights, and some of the most known bugs and requested changes
We highly recommend this Christmas campaign and we advise you to enjoy it with some milk and cookies. You can also call your friends for some co-op mayhem!
As always, don’t forget to read the interview with Spy's Cr3ed in which he shares his experience with the creation of the campaign and his struggles from being a beginner modder to a well established veteran now.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! See you in 2023 with more "Featured Mod" articles!
Link to the campaign: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2811668527
BASEMENT CHATS WITH YASEN
HO-HO-HO! Happy Holidays everyone! Today we are speaking with a fellow countryman from Bulgaria, so I didn't need to drag him to my basement from afar. Please greet Spy's Creed!
⚪Welcome to the basement Spy, please introduce yourself to those who don't know you. Since when are you a part of the Serious Sam community and when did you start modding for the game?
Hola Yasen, a fellow bulgar! I'm the one whose name has always been misspelled. On a serious note, I'm mainly known as a modder and recently as an animator as well. I've dedicated a good time of my childhood to modding with trials and errors and overall this has been a very fun and challenging experience. What brought me to modding was a misclick back in the day. I've always been wondering what's the purpose of the other executable icons until I ended up opening the Editor and my curiosity increased even more!
⚪You have mostly specialized in making weapon animations and they are indeed very good. What encouraged you to create a whole campaign such as Winter Wonderland? What was the experience of working on such a big project?
I've always wanted to make some kind of campaign. I love the creativity you can put into the visuals and the way you can create interesting gameplay with proper balance and gimmicks. The only problem is that this takes a lot of time and you really gotta know what makes a map look and play interesting. Working on Winter Wonderland was a very awesome experience. A lot of stuff was constantly changing. The first idea was to just make a short map that represents one of the Serious Sam Xbox cutscenes but extended into a level. Later this turned into a concept for an entire campaign. Due to the scale of the project, I've always had concerns if it's worth it, if I can even make it, and so on, which led to some delays in the release date.
Now it's time to introduce Anna "Musearys" Lazarev who was remaking some of the Serious Sam soundtracks and posting them on CT. I remember that she asked if somebody was interested in her remixes being included in people's maps. I decided to give it a shot and showed her the concept and work in progress. She apparently liked it so much that she offered to compose an entire OST for the campaign which was very surprising, so why not give it a try, let's go wild! Besides being a composer, I met a real friend in her. She's been with me since the beginning and I'm very glad that she wasn’t even concerned about giving up because it took a while. I'm not gonna lie, it took time until the release. Her work was one of the greatest motivations to actually cross the line of just abandoning yet another project. I was consistently watching how she kept improving with her music, which really made me push the campaign's visuals and gameplay as well. I wanted the soundtrack quality to complement the campaign's quality.
⚪Anna has become a huge part of the community by doing a great job at community projects and also composing for Siberian Mayhem! Now that the campaign is a year old, do you plan on putting all the experience you have gained into another campaign or do you plan on putting it into some other project?
I have a few projects in mind, yeah. Some are in progress, but I don't have as much free time anymore as I used to before. It's not like I'm super busy, but it's just not the same. So yeah the future will show what new I can bring into the workshop I would love to. One of the most publicly known projects I’m currently working on is Jungle Inferno for Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem. We've already had alpha testing and people liked it. Unfortunately, they just don't realize how much more work is required to be the way I want it to be. I can describe it as If Serious Sam 2 and Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope were merged into one. I really love the art style of both and it seems very fitting with each other
⚪You mentioned starting modding young. What are some pieces of advice that you would give to the young and new modders, now that you have left all this experience behind?
Something I'd highly suggest is: START EASY! Don't go for an ultra-massive project. I know that your mind can go wild and you want to try everything, but I can almost guarantee you the burnout you'll feel with it and later the failure. If you want to make a level, cool, go for it, but let it be something that you can realistically continue working on until it's finished. Always listen to the feedback and consider applying it if it's reasonable enough. Most of the beginner modders are having this mindset that constructive feedback is a form of hate, which is NOT! Feedback is what will drastically improve your mods and you as a modder. Another thing that is community-related is that when you're asking for help, be polite and patient! Mind you that most of the modders you praise are way older than you so try to not make them feel bothered.
⚪ That is actually a very good piece of advice I totally agree with. Okay Spy, my Bulgarian brother, I would like to thank you for coming to my basement and having this interview. Let’s wrap it up and open a bottle of rakija, but before that, please wish something to our dear readers for the Holiday and feel free to shout out to anyone, the stage is all yours!
If you ended up here then I guess you've read it all which is kinda epic. I hope you found anything from that interview useful and uhh.. that's about it. Happy Holidays!! I wish everyone good luck, happiness, and success in the new 2023 year! Thanks to everybody who has helped me in the past. I really do appreciate the people who had the nerve to handle me wow... UrbanDeHuman, DeadKadath, and absolutely everybody else!
