#alien academy

We made the strongest team in the world with the power of a magical space rock. Only we then used the space rock people to train an even stronger team using the power of human excellence.

And then another team comes along and is like: well we also trained against magical space rock-boosted humans with the power of human excellence but we combined it with the power of friendship!

In the past 6 months, Alien Academy’s come so far!  He’s a glimpse at what the game looks like now.  If you look back on our last post (from December...), you can see how far this game has come visually!

Hey fellow earthlings!

It's been a while since we've posted an update about the progress of our gameplay.  SO, why say with words what we can say with a video!

Alien Academy is a long game, and we only have until May to finish it (or beyond, depending).  We decided to prioritize the systems that make this game what it is, spending the last few months focusing on AI programming for the aliens - which is now set in motion and working.

Next stop: schedule building and then Alien Interaction.

Through the many iterations and prototypes we've produced since we beginning, we're finally moving back to the heart of what makes Alien Academy what it is: the whacky relationships and moments that come out of clashing AIs.  So hopefully you'll be seeing some of that soon!

We're hoping to clean up the school and get more polished art assets in soon.  But until then, we have a lot of work cut out for us.  :}

Some more mock-ups for visual style using our second alien: fuzzy guy!

These will have have species names some day, probably, most likely, maybe...

No one ever said I could colour...

Our deliverable for this week is visual look and feel, so we decided to start with doing some visual mock-ups of aliens in different styles.  This is one of my current favourite designs done with a couple different colouring styles and in different palettes!  These are the first three - more to come, for sure.  :}  (I like the first and second palettes the best.)

Concept art?!  WHOA.

Currently, while we're setting up our prototype for Alien Academy, I (Elyse) have been working on trying to design interesting aliens to populate the school with.

For the first page, I wanted to try with some aliens inspired by shapes and balance.  The first guy, the fuzzy one, is more bottom heavy, and the other one is just... WELL I have no idea.  And then there's that creepy rug monster.

The second page was fun, because I wanted to experiment with humanoid, bipedal aliens with interesting shapes.  I'm really happy with the way the one on the top right turned out, but the other ones were working with combinations of characteristics of deep sea fish (jellyfish, axolotl, etc) and these flowing, beautiful forms.

Both pages are so different, but I really enjoyed doing both of them!  There's a third page and I'm still working on trying interesting and strange designs, so there'll be a lot more of these in the future.