Eight years later
It’s been a minute! I wonder if anyone is still checking back here regularly, I hope not but in any case, hi again! Turns out life got busy, in a good way.
It’s interesting making this update because it’s forced me to try and look back at the way things were 8 years ago, feels like a different life! Not long after Let Them Come shipped, I took a break from personal game development. That project asked a lot more of me than I expected, and I felt I needed to do something different. In 2026 the game has over a thousand reviews and a very positive rating on Steam and that’s great to see.
Returning to 2018, some time after shipping LTC, I put 100% of my focus on my VFX career and within that I founded Tuatara, and that’s more or less where the last eight years went. Professionally, that’s meant growing a studio from the ground up. Personally, it’s meant becoming a parent, twice!
What started as a small crew of VFX artists has grown into a studio that has and continues to co-develop and provide specialized real-time services for a great lineup of projects, including Gears of War, Mortal Kombat, Valorant, Solar Ash, and Fortnite, among others.
We’re also making our own games, most recently Let Them Come: Onslaught, a new game set in the Let Them Come universe. It’s out now on Steam, if you’re craving a return to the franchise.
Going through the website to archive it, I noticed a lot of things I posted about with a lot of enthusiasm never made it past the idea stage, Plastic Sea being a good example. That’s alright. It’s actually nice to look back and see what was catching my interest at any given point over the years, including the stuff that didn’t make it far.
Which is really the point of this post, I’m archiving klemenlozar.com. It’s not disappearing, but I don’t expect to post here much in the future, if at all. You can consider it a personal museum piece. While my digital presence has much reduced, if you’d like to keep up with what I’m doing these days, Tuatara is the best place to look, and you can also find me on Bluesky.
Overall it’s been a great decade, maybe I’ll post another update in the 2030s haha. Thanks for reading!
News
Update
Just like that we’re almost coming up to a year since Let Them Come was released, time flies! I want to cover some of the things I’ve learned from that project soon, but that will be a separate blog post. I’ve been neglecting my personal website despite being very active, I want to change that but it will require a redesign and a bit of a facelift. The site is feeling outdated and slow, I want to streamline it to allow faster updates, archive older stuff and enable cross posting from my Twitter. Speaking of which, I encourage you to follow me if you want to see the latest progress on my new game project (more below) and realtime FX tips and tricks I’ve been posting in gif format, coming up to a 100 of those! I want to catalog them on my website soon so you can see all of them in the same place.
I’m working on a new game! It’s early on, I’m still exploring the overall core gameplay and visual style but I’m very excited. I’m calling it Plastic Sea, a sandbox adventure game about exploring and nurturing an ocean environment. I will have more to say about where I want it to go in terms of gameplay in the future but meanwhile, check out the poster I made and a couple of gameplay gifs below. Oh, you’ll play as a hermit crab!
Under the right circumstance the environment will be able to host a vast array of plants and wildlife, it will be up to you to make sure the conditions are right for life to flourish!
You’ll be able to break down different kinds of waste into a manageable resource:
An example of a special natural event you’ll be able to see, baby turtles charging across the beach from their nest to the ocean:
Let Them Come Released!
Let Them Come is now available on Steam and Xbox! Soon also coming to iOS, Android and PS4.
Here’s a short backstory on how it all started that I wrote for Xbox Wire.
In late 2014 I left Rocksteady in London and moved to Vancouver to work for a large game studio. Even though I was working at the cutting edge of games technology, I had been aspiring to also be a part of something more personal at that time. I looked up to successful indie game developers and grew fond of the idea of creating my own game, or being a part of a very small team of developers collaborating on a project.
It all started very innocently, exploring new software and new art techniques. There were no expectations. After all, I was doing this in the little spare time I had. As I got more comfortable using new tools, things increasingly got more exciting. An experience started to emerge, I was creating something truly my own and something others could interact with. I could clearly visualize it then, the game I wanted it to become.
Vancouver has a blooming indie scene. Only a couple of weeks after starting active development, I was taking the early prototype to indie meetups where other like-minded people hang out, a lot of them showing off their own creations. For the first time, strangers played my game and I got to see their positive reactions. I was captivated, there was no going back. I was really making a game! I named it Let Them Come.
I always liked those spectacle moments in first-person shooters where you mounted a gun turret and let loose against a horde of enemies, mowing them down. When I think about those action sequences, franchises like the “Alien” always come to mind and that ended up being one of the main sources of inspiration for the overall atmosphere and feeling of the game. Respecting this strict design limitation of no player movement left me free to focus on finding where the true fun of the moment is and building on top of that.
After about a year of development I partnered with an indie publisher Versus Evil. They came with experience and expertise that would give Let Them Come a fighting chance in a busy and saturated game market. To that end, I was very excited at the prospect of eventually releasing the game on Xbox.
Launching on Xbox One is fantastic, as the team behind certification have been great to work with and throw in the fact that Let Them Come feels great with the Xbox One controller — it’s a win-win. Launch time has finally arrived and with the release right around the corner I’m happy to say I can look back at those early days with a sense of accomplishment and pride.
Please join me in celebrating the release of my first indie game Let Them Come by ripping through alien scourge! I hope you have as much fun playing as I had making it.
Let Them Come – Release Date!
Super excited to announce Let Them Come is launching on October 3rd! First coming to Xbox and Steam, other platforms will follow very soon. You can look forward to more frequent updates in the future, coming first, my thoughts around development and release of the game.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/505630/Let_Them_Come/
Let Them Come, Update
It’s been way too long time since my last post and a lot of exciting things have happened since.
I’ve partnered up with an indie publisher Versus Evil and started my own company, Tuatara Games.
Let Them Come has been to multiple game shows around the world. Pax East in Boston, Rezzed and CoxCon in London and recently Pax West in Seattle. A ton of people and media outlets have played the game and the response has been great. You can read some of the impressions here:
Oprainfall:
“I have to say, I was very surprised by just how much I fell in love with Let Them Come”
Gamer Assault Weekly:
“Man the gun placements, we’ve got a horde of aliens inbound!”
Hardcore Gamer:
“Let Them Come May Be This Year’s Best Dumb Game”
Check out the Twitch stream from Pax West to see me talk about some of the planned Twitch features Let Them Come will ship with. In short, anyone will be able to broadcast the game with Twitch and have their viewers influence the gameplay.
Let Them Come is coming soon so check out our Steam store page to add it to your wishlist!
Gears Of War 4 is out!
Gears Of War 4, the other game I’ve been busy with for the past couple of years as a Lead VFX artist for cinematics has just been released to critical acclaim. Check out the release trailer below to see a lot of cinematics me and my team worked on, but more importantly, get the game and have fun playing!
Let Them Come in the media
With the release of the first official trailer, Let Them Come has been picking up momentum. Click on the logos to read about some first impressions!
Touch Arcade:
Pocket Gamer:
Touch Tap Play:
Let Them Come Update – First Game Trailer
Development on Let Them Come is progressing nicely. I’ve recently completed a marketing milestone where I set out to release the first game trailer and a new website. I’m currently developing new items/enemy types and working on Android and iOS integration.
New game website:
www.let-them.com
Making a game!
For the last three months I’ve been working on a pixel art shoot’em up game in my spare time, called Let Them Come. It’s inspired by retro action classics like Metal Slug and Doom among others. You’re playing as the last survivor on a mission that went sour and you’re not going out without putting up a good fight! It will feature waves of increasingly difficult monsters, item progression and satisfyingly gory combat.
I will be playtesting the game for the first time during this month’s Full Indie meetup, May 27th in Vancouver, BC. Drop by if you’re in the area!
Keep your eyes on this blog and my twitter @Klemen_Lozar, for development updates!
Work in progress
I’ve been working on a new personal project in UE4 which involved making my first realtime character. Obviously inspired by Minions from Despicable Me films, this guy is fully rigged and waiting for animation. I’m currently blocking out the environment and finishing the storyboards, still quite a way to go. The image above is straight from Unreal 4.
Polycount is currently hosting a Riot Games art contest and I’m participating in the VFX category. You can track my progress by clicking on the banner above!
Does anyone read this?
It’s been a while since I made a news post. Still busy creating realtime visual effects at Rocksteady and working on personal projects when I can. I’ve uploaded a couple of new videos to Game VFX section since my last post here and I’ve decided to move away from uploading videos in quicktime format and go for more flexible mp4. I found I get better quality for size and it’s a lot easier to embed into the website with a flash player, no need to open new windows, nice and simple! I re-uploaded the wildfire explosion videos in 1080 as well, but I won’t be changing older stuff so you’ll still need quicktime to view those on my website.
That’s it for now, more content coming soon.
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Latest Posts
- Eight years later August 16, 2026
- Update August 7, 2018
- Let Them Come Released! October 12, 2017
- Let Them Come – Release Date! September 27, 2017
- Let Them Come, Update October 12, 2016
- Gears Of War 4 is out! October 12, 2016