The eighth passenger of Icaros 1

Going from white, sterile spaceship interiors to slimy (probably unhygienic) alien stowaways; I was put in charge of designing and animating the first enemy the player will encounter in the game. The original concept document already had completed enemy designs but the group found them to be more adorable than terrifying, which did not really match the tone we were going for. One of the main aesthetics of the game is the dark and haunting atmosphere of being aboard a ship flooded with hostile alien life.

The first alien the player will encounter is able to fire projectiles in the direction of the last occupied space of the player character. The alien also has the ability to multiply; creating an identical clone of itself. It can move across the empty space inside the ship to hunt the player if they are within range for the alien to be aware of them. With these features in mind I looked for ideas in creatures that inhabit earth with similar abilities.
The closest thing I was able to find was prehistorical, single-cellular organisms that would multiply and create a larger organism over time.
Even though I reasoned that the alien had to be strange and foreign the idea of giant single-cellular aliens sounded sounded good. I wanted to avoid creating disgusting aliens with lots of teeth, claws, tentacles and other disturbing features because because all those listed examples are only scary because we are biologically programmed to associate them with danger. What is truly scary are things we do not know or understand and it does make sense that alien life would not necessarily resemble life as we know it. A creature without a mouth to house teeth or limbs to have claws would by this logic be more scary than generic bug or carnivorous mouths.
The result of my thought process was a ball of slime. This design was pretty generic as well so to add more unnatural elements to the alien I put a rotating metallic pyramid in the middle of it, the tip facing the front of the alien and the base facing the back. The solid and pointy pyramid would clash with the soft and fluid organic slime which was just what I wanted.

The following gifs are the four different states of the first finished designed alien.

Idle:

Multiply:

Attack:

Death:

The motion was not difficult to achieve per se, but it was more time consuming than I would have thought. Most difficulties arose from the fact that Photoshop is not primarily an animation program. There lots of bugs and lack of functions animation programs like Flash would (not) have. For every minor change to the key frame I had to go back and redo the animation until only the specific images for the key frames were visible when they needed to be visible.

I am happy with the results though. For all the hardship I had to endure this was way more fun that building tiles for the spaceship. Look forward to more updates!

/Erik Ögren

About Erik Ögren

2014  Graphics

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