Featured Mod - Pyramid of Prophecy

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Heya folks! It’s time to dive back into the Serious Sam Workshop and put the spotlight on another massive community creation. Today we are checking out Pyramid of Prophecy!

If you’ve been craving some classic Serious Sam action with a modern coat of paint, it’s time to pack your bags for Egypt! Created by Wolfen325 and Riba4ok13, Pyramid of Prophecy takes the classic desert setting we all know and love and brings it into Serious Sam 4 with huge environments, ancient ruins, plenty of secrets and, naturally, enough enemies to keep your trigger finger busy.

What originally started as a relatively simple Egyptian map inspired by the classics quickly grew into something much bigger. New locations were added, the mysterious pyramid became the centerpiece of the adventure, and an entire story gradually formed around it. The result is a campaign that mixes the atmosphere of classic Serious Sam with the scale and possibilities of Serious Sam 4.

And when it comes to the shooting part, the campaign certainly doesn’t hold back. Expect huge encounters, enemies from across different Serious Sam eras, quieter moments to catch your breath, plenty of secrets to hunt down and even a couple of secret bosses waiting for the most curious explorers. All of this comes without relying on Serious Sam 4’s gadgets, keeping the experience focused firmly on good old-fashioned running and gunning.

So what are you waiting for? Load up, head into the desert and see what exactly is waiting inside the Pyramid of Prophecy!

Make sure to subscribe to the campaign and give it a ride!

And now, we’re heading back down into the basement. This time we’ve managed to squeeze two modders inside, so please welcome Wolfen325 and Riba4ok13 for some behind-the-scenes talk about how Pyramid of Prophecy came together!

BASEMENT CHATS WITH YASEN

⚪ Hey Riba4ok13 and Wolfen325, welcome to the basement! Before we jump into Pyramid of Prophecy itself, let’s start with your beginnings. How did each of you first get into Serious Sam mapping and modding, and how did the two of you eventually end up working on this project together?

Wolfen325: Hi everyone! I’m glad to be here!

I first discovered Serious Sam when I was very young, I was only six years old at the time. My father was the one who introduced me to the franchise. Back then, I had The First Encounter and Serious Sam 2, which I played throughout my childhood. I’m only 18 now, but over these twelve years, my love for Serious Sam has only grown stronger. I even remember buying an Xbox specifically so I could play Serious Sam 4.

Once I built my own PC, I became interested in more than just playing games, I wanted to understand how everything worked behind the scenes. Even as a kid, I remember finding the Editor inside the game folder, although I had absolutely no idea what to do with it back then.

I started taking level creation more seriously with Serious Engine 2017. My first map was made by following YouTube tutorials and gradually figuring out how everything worked.

Later, I met Riba4ok13. He shared guides and useful advice with me, and after that I went back and reworked my first map. That helped me become much more familiar with Serious Engine. We were constantly talking, showing each other our work and discussing different ideas.

Eventually, I moved to Serious Engine 4 myself, and by that point I already had some experience with it. At one point, Riba4ok13 suggested that we try making something together, so I proposed creating a map specifically for Serious Sam 4, with an Egyptian theme as the foundation.

And that’s how our joint project began. For Riba4ok13, this was his first experience working with Serious Engine 4, so we learned a lot of things together, constantly sharing our experience, ideas and progress.

Riba4ok13: Hello fighters!

As for me, I first met Serious Sam when I was four. Funny enough, the first game I encountered wasn’t actually an official game, but a mod for Serious Sam: The Second Encounter called Bastion of Darkness. After that, I found TSE and TFE.

It’s funny that I discovered Sam through a mod and eventually ended up creating mods myself. Huh.

Anyway, I started modding in 2020 when Thanadrax released a mapping guide. That helped me a lot with learning how everything worked. I spent about half a week learning and it was pretty hard for me, so I took a break for more than half a year. Later, I saw a lot of people creating maps using the same guide, so I decided to finally finish mine, and in 2021 it was released.

That was really the beginning of my modding journey. I participated in the Khreth Mapping Challenge: Crystal Impact, then the SeriousSite JingleBombs 2022 contest, WaterWorld 2023 and many more interesting jams and collaborations.

Back in 2025, I spent a lot of my time helping with a big project made by a friend of mine. I became very tired of working on visuals and level design, and eventually found a bit of rest in collaborating with Wolfen325.

A little introduction to that: I had been following his work for a while, giving him advice and helping with testing. His last project that I tested had gameplay that was really annoying to me. I even told him it might be better to remake it from scratch! He tried to fix the existing version instead. It feels much better now than the test version, although it can still be annoying sometimes, in my opinion.

After that, I decided I wanted to show him how I would approach the gameplay. I asked if he wanted to collaborate and he liked the idea. I told him, “I’m very tired of making maps from zero, so can I just focus on the gameplay part and show how cool it can be?” And he agreed.

Then I told him, “Make the map you want to see in Serious Sam 4. I’ll make everything else feel alive.”

It was a big surprise when he came back and showed me a giant Egypt map.

I love Egypt maps. The First Encounter is my favorite game.

⚪ Having two creators behind one campaign can either make development twice as easy or twice as chaotic. How did you split the work between the two of you? Did you each have specific areas you focused on, or was everything built and shaped together along the way?

Wolfen325: At the beginning of the project, we divided the roles right away. I was mainly responsible for the visuals and level design, while Riba4ok13 handled the gameplay and scripting. However, throughout development, we still made a lot of decisions together.

The first version of the map I made was pretty lacking in detail and honestly didn’t look very good. Riba4ok13 pointed that out to me, so I started a pretty long process of reworking and improving the visuals. A lot of things had to be redone and polished before the map started looking the way we wanted it to.

While working on the map, I also learned a lot of new things, especially how to work with destruction, animations, cutscenes and various other details.

Our vision for the map also changed quite a few times. Originally, it wasn’t even supposed to end at the pyramid, and the working title was Sands of Immortality. Later, Riba4ok13 came up with the idea of adding a pyramid, so I ended up creating three additional locations.

Riba4ok13 mainly handled the scripting and gameplay, and he also came up with most of the secrets. I added a few of my own, including the developer room. I was initially responsible for the level design, but later Riba4ok13 also became more involved and contributed his own ideas.

So even though we divided the main responsibilities at the beginning, throughout development we were constantly sharing ideas and building on each other’s work.

Riba4ok13: Yeah. As I mentioned before, I was mostly focused on gameplay, but sometimes I also helped with advice on visuals and level design.

Things like: “Are you serious? You want to finish the map by just walking through a corridor and looking at the pyramid? No, my friend, this is not how it ends. Make a path to the pyramid and let Sam enter it. That would be much better.”

Or: “Come on, bro, you just sent me empty boxes. That’s not fine! As we agreed, I’m making the gameplay while you’re making the visual part. You should improve it.”

Big thanks also go to our testers, who helped us find a lot of bugs and gave us plenty of advice on how to improve both the visuals and gameplay.

⚪ What was the original idea behind Pyramid of Prophecy? Was there a particular piece of Serious Sam lore, setting, or gameplay idea that made you say, “Yep, this is what we want to build”? And how much did that original idea change during development?

Riba4ok13: I’ll give this one to Wolfen325, since it was his idea to make an Egypt themed map.

Wolfen325: The original idea was actually pretty simple, I wanted to create an Egyptian map in the style of the classic Serious Sam games while adding some new elements from the fourth game.

At the same time, we didn’t want to use the gadgets from Serious Sam 4. I’ve always liked the way the Egyptian locations look in Serious Engine 4, so I wanted to try creating something of my own.

At first, I wasn’t even thinking about having a serious story. I simply wanted to make a good Egyptian map that would somewhat resemble Dunes from the original Serious Sam and be set somewhere in the middle of the desert. That’s where our original working title, Sands of Immortality, came from.

But as development continued, the map started changing quite a lot. We gradually reworked the visuals, added new locations, and our overall vision for the project kept getting bigger.

Things changed especially after Riba4ok13 came up with the idea of adding a pyramid. From that point on, the story also slowly started to take shape, with watafff.ru helping us develop it along the way.

In the end, not much of the original idea remained unchanged, the map evolved significantly in terms of its visuals, locations and overall concept. Honestly, when we first started, we never expected it to become this popular or attract this much attention.

⚪ A Serious Sam campaign lives and dies by its combat encounters and pacing, and Pyramid of Prophecy certainly isn’t shy about throwing hordes at the player. How did you approach designing the fights, especially when deciding when to unleash complete chaos and when to give the player a little room to breathe?

Wolfen325: Riba4ok13 was mainly responsible for the combat and the overall pacing of the game. He handled enemy placement, designed the main encounters, and decided where the player should get a bit of a breather and where we should throw them into a much bigger fight.

We wanted to keep the feeling of classic Serious Sam, where a quieter section can suddenly turn into a huge battle.

I didn’t get too involved in this part of development, but from time to time I would suggest adding or changing something if I felt that a particular area was missing a certain moment. So we still discussed the encounters together, but most of the actual work in this area was done by Riba4ok13.

Riba4ok13: Now it’s my time to shine! Ahem.

Back when I was developing a map for the WaterWorld 2023 contest, my friend SANWSH gave me one cool piece of advice: “When you can beat the map without any problems, then it’s good. If you have any really difficult encounters, you should fix them, because authors always play their own maps better than other players.”

I still keep those words in mind.

But when I moved to the Serious Sam 4 Editor, I suddenly felt free to use thousands of enemies and bring some real carnage into this giant map. One of my friends even said, “It’s the most Serious Sam 4-type Serious Sam 4 map I have played in a while.”

It’s still balanced, though. And I can beat it without any problems!

As Wolfen325 mentioned before, we changed the name from Sands of Immortality to Pyramid of Prophecy. There’s actually a little backstory behind that name.

I really like Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour, and while following its developers I discovered their other games, Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch. I love those games too, especially their soundtracks. One of the tracks plays in the main menu of the Heroes of Hammerwatch DLC called Pyramid of Prophecy.

Got it?

I even used that theme at the end of the map. It’s so cool. I also used music from the tower defense series Kingdom Rush, which fits surprisingly well in a Serious Sam game.

As for difficult encounters, there were definitely some. I even rebuilt the gameplay from scratch in a few places to make it better, and I think it worked out well.

The final version of the map also has far more weapons in the starting location than the first version did. Originally, we only had TFE and BFE-themed enemies. Later, I added more Serious Sam 4 enemies too, although still no Polyp-style enemies since the map takes place in the past.

I also deliberately kept some areas empty so players could rest. Sometimes there are only a few enemies, and sometimes there’s nobody at all.

There’s also one interesting little thing worth mentioning. Most of our testers didn’t like the soundtrack playing during the corridor minigun fight, so I listened to them and made a special secret that lets players change the fight music. The secret track feels much more cheerful, while the standard fight theme is more intense.

We also had trouble deciding who the final boss should be. We didn’t want to use Ugh-Zan or the Reptiloid Bride because they felt too predictable. Players could easily guess who the final boss was going to be, and we didn’t want that.

Big thanks to Serafettin for porting The Last Hope’s Giant Space Mummy to Serious Sam 4.

I’ve also always enjoyed making interesting and unusual secrets in my maps while still keeping some classic ones too. You know, walk around a rock and — hey, there’s a secret!

There are even two secret bosses.

Try to find them both, heheh.

⚪ Now that Pyramid of Prophecy is out in the wild, what comes next for the two of you? Is this collaboration something you’d like to continue, or are you already disappearing back into your separate corners of the Serious Editor?

Wolfen325: We’ll definitely keep in touch, and there’s a good chance we’ll work on more projects together in the future. When exactly that will happen is hard to say for now.

We do have plans for a continuation of this map, but it’s definitely not something to expect anytime soon. We also discussed the idea of a New Game+, but for now, that’s very unlikely.

As for me personally, I’m currently working on several projects of my own. The biggest one is my first full campaign, with its own beginning and ending.

I’m also learning another engine at the moment, and I’m planning to make a small game set in the Serious Sam universe with it. For me, it will be something like a demo project where I can test my skills, try out new things and eventually share the result with the awesome Serious Sam community.

We both have our own personal projects right now, but that definitely doesn’t mean we’ll stop talking after the mod is released. Quite the opposite, we’ll keep sharing ideas, discussing what we’re working on and helping each other out.

So even if our next joint project isn’t coming anytime soon, our collaboration definitely doesn’t end here.

Riba4ok13: Wolfen325 said it all. Nothing to add except one thing.

I also help my friends with their projects and test them. I like following newcomers and helping them make their projects better. After all, I like playing Serious Sam, and the more maps it has, the happier I am.

I hate seeing projects get cancelled after people have already shown screenshots and footage of them!

⚪ To wrap things up, the floor is yours! Who would you like to give a shout out to for helping bring Pyramid of Prophecy across the finish line, and is there anything else you’d like to tell the community before we send them in to face whatever madness you’ve prepared for them?

Wolfen325 & Riba4ok13: First of all, we’d like to thank everyone who helped us during development, our testers, everyone who gave us advice, shared ideas or simply supported us along the way. A special thanks to everyone who helped bring this huge map to life.

We’d also like to thank everyone who has already played our campaign or is planning to play it. We put a lot of time, effort and probably a few more nerves than we expected into it. 😄

We hope you’ll have as much fun playing it as we had creating it.

And of course, a huge thank you to Croteam for creating such an awesome game and giving us a universe we can keep creating and modding for.

And now, enough talking, Sam is waiting.

Load your weapons, check your ammo and head into the desert!

“The pyramid is made of stone, but I’m still rock.” 😎

See you in the desert. Stay Serious!