Inside Serum an Exclusive Interview Unveiling the New Era of Survival Gaming

SERUM, Game Island, and the survival race against time

Step into the harsh world of SERUM, now listed on Steam as Serum: Toxic Survival, where survival is more than a struggle. It is a race against time itself. The game builds its identity around a mysterious liquid that can keep you alive, empower your character, and punish poor planning if you push too far into the Blight without preparing properly.

After sharing my hands-on impressions in an earlier review, my curiosity only grew as the game moved closer to release. To get a deeper look behind the scenes, I connected with the team at Game Island, including Piotr Siemaszko, who handled marketing for SERUM.

They opened up about the creative origins of the game, the challenge of building a survival formula around Serum brewing, the pressure of player feedback, and what it means to develop a new survival game inside a hostile world where every dose matters.

Editor’s note: This interview was originally conducted around the game’s Early Access launch period. Some answers refer to plans and features as they were discussed at that time.

SERUM – Official Release Trailer

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The Making of SERUM – Game Island’s Vision

Q: What inspired the concept and story of SERUM?

Drawing from science-fiction and survival influences across various media, SERUM offers a fresh take. While the notion of a “doom clock” may ring familiar, our focus lies in the art of brewing. Players can concoct diverse strategies, blending life-sustaining substances to empower their character and tackle challenges head-on. There isn’t really one specific thing that inspired it, rather a collection of ideas and inspirations that have helped formulate the ideas to flourish.

Q: How did your team come together to work on this project?

Our team came together driven by a shared passion for innovation and a desire to push the boundaries of the survival genre. Each member brought a unique set of skills and experiences to the table. We were united by a common goal: to create something truly special and redefine what players expect from survival games.

Game Development Process

Q: Can you describe the development process of SERUM?

It’s a typical game dev story, just like any other. We began with extensive brainstorming sessions, during which we outlined the core concepts and mechanics we wanted to incorporate into the game. From there, we moved into pre-production, where we fleshed out the game’s world, characters, and storyline. Our main focus, though, remained on creating a fun and in-depth Serum brewing system that is unique in the genre, and we spent most of our development time bringing it to life.

Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during development?

One of the biggest challenges we faced during the development of SERUM was striking the right balance of difficulty, which is crucial for the survival genre. Balancing difficulty in a way that offers both a challenging experience and a sense of achievement without frustrating players was no small feat. We invested significant time and resources into playtesting and iterating on game mechanics to ensure that the difficulty curve felt natural and rewarding. This involved adjusting how much time the player has before the next Serum dose, resource scarcity, and refining combat mechanics to provide a fair but challenging experience for players of all skill levels.

Gameplay Mechanics

Q: How did you balance the survival elements with the action in SERUM?

SERUM isn’t combat-focused by design; it builds everything around a kind of alchemy that encourages the player to gather resources in order to create various Serums to overcome the challenges he faces—some of which will help him in combat. Additionally, some areas on the map may be unreachable to them at first and will require a specific variant of Serum to become available for the players. Having a proper Serum-induced ability will become crucial during exploration. This gives us both the alchemy and the action as part of the game’s design.

Q: What makes the Serum brewing mechanism unique in the game?

The constant time pressure the players will face is a unique aspect of the game. The player will be mindful that he needs to be able to return from an excursion in time to purify his blood from the deadly effects of The Blight or administer the next dose of Serum to prolong his life. This is indeed a fresh twist on the survival genre. Serum is both a curse and a lifeline, and we must be ready to bear the consequences of our loadout choices every time we leave our base.

Artistic and Design Choices

Q: What influenced the artistic direction of SERUM?

Our talented design team uses all kinds of inspirations. For example, there’s a lot of inspiration taken from the natural world—we have one mutated creature in the game inspired by arachnids, complete with crushing pincers. The team will build out a mood board filled with lots of different things to inspire them: it could be animals, plants, movie stills, posters, or man-made physical items. They’ll have an idea for what they want to design and will then take inspiration from those and allow their own creative freedom to generate it.

Q: How did you decide on the game’s visual and audio style?

Audio design was picked up by a few streamers, actually—they found that the music and sounds put them on edge in places during the Steam Next Fest demo and created a unique atmosphere, and that’s exactly what we wanted. Visually, we wanted SERUM to stand out. The biomes in the game have a distinct look as well, which helps define each area that the player explores. For example, the forest may be dark, overgrown, and gloomy, but there are points in the map where sunlight pierces through the trees and open areas where the sunlight hits the toxic mist, which makes it look extremely atmospheric. The swamp biome, by contrast, is a different color consisting of more earthy tones.

Technical Aspects

Q: What was it like working with Unreal Engine 5 for this game?

Utilizing the power of Unreal Engine 5.0 has been really useful in communicating the destroyed and derelict world of SERUM. We want players to ask the question, “what happened here?” when they find an abandoned car or a damaged building. Unreal gives us the ability to establish a look and feel for an environment quite seamlessly. In general, it’s an incredibly creative tool that excels at world-building.

Q: Did you encounter any significant technical hurdles?

When we began switching to the latest iteration of the engine, we already had a big chunk of the game ready, and it wasn’t all smooth sailing. We have encountered some hurdles, but nothing our team couldn’t handle. We made it one of our priorities to create an immersive and visually striking experience for the players, and we’re happy to say we have accomplished it.

Community Engagement

Q: How has player feedback influenced the development of SERUM?

Player feedback is essential to us for SERUM during its early access phase. We got some great insights into how players used the brewing system in the demo, which was interesting because there were aspects that we are now looking to adjust based on how they interacted with it during Steam Next Fest, so in that respect, feedback is important. We see our community as an essential part of the development process, and we’re committed to actively involving them and listening to their thoughts, suggestions, and concerns to shape the game into the best possible experience.

Q: Are there plans to involve the community in future development phases?

Absolutely, we see this as crucial to building the game they want to play. Our goal is to work hand in hand with our community to shape SERUM into a game that exceeds expectations and delivers a truly exceptional experience for all players.

Challenges and Achievements

Q: What has been the most rewarding part of developing SERUM?

I think one of the great things was how players and content creators reacted to the demo, which came together relatively quickly. Even though the demo only gave players a very small taste of the game, the buzz and the feedback we got was even better than we could have hoped for.

Q: Are there any accomplishments during development that you are particularly proud of?

We’re especially proud of our ability to innovate within the survival genre. We strived to offer players a fresh and unique experience, and it was immensely gratifying to see their positive reactions to the game’s mechanics, world-building, and storytelling after releasing the demo.

Future Plans and Updates

Q: Can you share any upcoming features or updates players can look forward to?

We’ll be revealing more about the game as we edge closer to early access, which includes a new biome that contrasts against what will be available when the game launches in early access. This includes new creatures, plus we’re working on some interesting traps as well, which we’ll also reveal more about when the time is right.

Q: What is the long-term vision for SERUM?

At the moment, our primary focus for SERUM is on achieving our short-term goal, which is to release the game in Early Access. We believe that by releasing SERUM in this stage, we can leverage the invaluable feedback from our community to refine and enhance the overall experience. Once we’ve gathered sufficient feedback and made the necessary adjustments, our long-term vision for SERUM will come into focus. We’re excited about the potential for growth and evolution that Early Access provides, and we’re committed to delivering the best possible experience for our players in the months to come.

Advice for Aspiring Developers

Q: What advice would you give to someone starting out in game development?

Build a community for your game and keep them involved every step of the way. At the end of the day, you’re building the game for them, not yourself. Sometimes it might mean having to make difficult choices about your game design or to get validation on parts of the game you might be unsure about, but using demos, playtests, beta sessions, and feedback is worth its weight in gold to a game designer.

Q: Are there any resources or tools you recommend for new developers?

While there are countless resources and tools available to game developers, perhaps the greatest tools of all are imagination and boldness. Game development is a creative endeavor that thrives on innovation and originality. Imagination fuels the creative process, allowing developers to envision worlds, characters, and gameplay mechanics that push the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s the spark that ignites ideas and drives developers to explore new concepts and experiment with unconventional approaches.

Closing Thoughts and Future Teasers

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience about SERUM or the development process that we haven’t covered?

Only that we’d love to hear what players think about the game. They can join our Discord, plus we’ve also got a “deadly diary” on social media told through the eyes of Adam, the game’s survivor protagonist, and it’s also where we reveal insights about the game and the world of SERUM.

Q: Can you give us any teasers or hints about upcoming games or projects that your team is working on?

I would, but then I’d have to kill you. 😉

Serum: Toxic Survival Game Info

Serum: Toxic Survival

Release: May 23, 2024

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG, Early Access, Survival

Developer: Game Island

Publisher: Toplitz Productions

Platform: PC via Steam

Final Thoughts

This interview shows how much of SERUM was built around pressure. Not only survival pressure inside the game, but design pressure too: how to balance difficulty, how to make the brewing system meaningful, how to keep player feedback involved, and how to make the Blight feel like more than just another survival hazard.

Game Island’s answers also show why community feedback mattered so much to the project. The game’s identity depends on that constant tension between preparation, exploration, risk, and the next dose that might keep you alive.

Related Reading

Read more of our coverage in our SERUM game review. For more developer conversations, visit our Developer Interviews hub.

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