Alien blast pipeline
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The document describes the ideation, pre-production, production, and post-production process for developing the game Alien Blast. The game was inspired by Whack-A-Mole and involves whacking alien heads that pop up on different planets. In pre-production, the team designed green and red alien characters and developed the story that aliens are invading and the player must eradicate them from different planets. In production, team members took on roles to program the game mechanics, develop art assets, and create music and sound effects. The game came together through iterative sharing of assets. In post-production, bugs were fixed and gameplay elements like alien spawn rates were balanced.
Alien blast pipeline
- 1. Ideation: The idea for Alien Blast came from the classic arcade game, Whack-A-Mole, which was invented back in 1976 by a man called Aaron Fechter. The original game consists of a small plastic hammer that you have to use on the arcade machine. On the machine, there are various holes spread out all over the surface, and when you player starts to play, small moles pop their heads out at the player must whack the moles to get a score. We took this idea and turned it more into a digital mode and then went further to make the game our own, by developing our own story. We had to think how it would stand out amongst other similar games. We came up with our story then thought about how we would start to produce the game. Pre-production: In pre production, we had to think about what our aliens were going to look like, as we didnʼt have to worry about what the player looked like, as you never saw the avatar that you play as. Some inspiration was the monster B.o.B from “Monsters vs Aliens” , I then went onto try start making some ideas for aliens, I started from scratch in photoshop and then showed my results to the team, they thought they were good, but in later testing, when the aliens were put into our game, they were too long and didnʼt fit the planets holes, so Annabel then went on to try create a more rounded alien. We also designed some red aliens which were different from the green aliens, they could not be ʻWhackedʼ but had to be avoided, it was our own little twist on the game. We also had to think of how eliminating all the aliens on one level would progress the story. The basic idea for our story was, aliens were invading. So we thought how we could keep this going on for a while with other levels. In the end, our story was that the astronaut (The player) had been sent into space on a special mission to push back the impending alien invasion from reaching earth. You must go from planet to planet, eradicating the alien threat on each planet, until the push the aliens our of our solar system. Thinking of what to do for art, for each individual level would have been quite easy. The level would change, when you moved planet, and there would be a different theme for each level. The background would have little animated stars in the background, just for some background art.
- 2. Production Because of our well prepped pre production, we could move into production swiftly. We each had our own roles to do, Faye was to start working in game salad and start trying to get the basics mechanics to work, Annabel was continuing to work on the art and design, I was finding sound effects and creating our own music to go over the top of the gameplay. We progressed together, so Annabel would send art that she had made, to Faye, then Faye would put the art into game salad and then the game would start to slowly come together. Thought the production we did have some problems in terms of programming, there were a few ares that Faye found hard to program and then resulted in some bugs. As Faye was happy with what she had made, she had then asked me for the music, so I sent over the music I had made, and see put it into game salad in the appropriate places, and then added some sound effects for when you had killed the aliens, and for various other things, such as losing the game or touching a red alien. We had looped the song, so the song would play when the player played the game and then when the credits would role. Post Production For post production, we mostly concentrated on fixing some of the bugs, and even when we had fixed most the bugs, there were still parts of the game that were working, but we thought we could make better, like the speed at which the aliens came out, the score you had to reach for the level, and how many red ones came out. It was towards the end when Annabel had sent the pictures of the stars to Faye, then Faye added them in and made them animate. This just brings a good feeling to the game and gives in a better atmosphere.