Obviously, my interest in this project has been rekindled. With so much time passing, some things about it I’ve more or less re-thought, while others remain the same. The one change that I alluded to before is retaining the lineage of Alien Arena – this game will officially be called Alien Arena: Saucermen. That really doesn’t change anything else – the vision of the game itself is still pretty intact, other than the slight branding update. Make no mistake, this project was always in my mind as Generation 4 of Alien Arena from the start (you can even see my first post on that years ago).
I have spent some time playing and fixing little bugs and things that were kind of in placeholder status. Visually I’m really happy with how the game renders and the art style. There is still a good bit of work to do on that though. Need to add animated and scrolling shaders, etc. Would like to add parallax mapping among other things. I’ve probably blathered about that a number of times, but I digress…
When I look at the current levels, the ones that are “alien”, I’m starting to feel the atmosphere now after a lot of tweaking and playing around. I know that the next pieces, which are the other player models, are going to follow with a similar gruesome, gory vibe.
Adding the melee weapon, the violator, is my next project. That shouldn’t be too difficult, and it’ll get me back into the weeds with the game code. I’ve also begun working on getting a lot of the code renamed to fit this project vs the original game, Frenzy. One other quick item would also be organizing the map models into subfolders. In fact, that really should be the next step.
Meanwhile, I have revamped the website https://martianbackup.com/Saucermen/index.html to include all new, current media.
I’m settled with the palette, settled with the weapons and characters. It’s time to get busy on really expanding the gameplay to include the other weapons and expand the renderer to incorporate a number of things CRX had in it.
Rebuilding some classic Alien Arena levels is also going to be important. Saucer of course has been done, and I’ve mentioned Violator as another. I will have to go through some of the levels do decide which to remake. I might even dive into some “deep cut” classics!