Collaborations and Running Aliens

I prepared a new build of the Alien Party game for last night's Boston Indies Demo Night.  I worked hard on that, and yet I ended up only showing it to one person.  I guess I am much shier than I thought :(. In any case, it is up on the website: http://alienpartygame.com.

The biggest change this time was the green alien.  I reworked the model in Blender to make it more cartoony and polished the animations a bit. Here is a before and after shot:

And here is a gameplay video of this build:

The fact is, much work remains to get to the point where I am comfortable showing this to more people for testing and feedback.  I will be working on the rocket landing and take-off sequences this week, and also in making the tagged aliens follow the astronaut in a line when he enters the rocket.  If I am quick enough, I should be able to replace the astronaut model, which was taken from a Unity tutorial, with my own astronaut girl.  The biggest addition I am planning is the party.  The game is not called Alien Party for nothing!  All the tagged aliens come to your party (an out of this world experience!) and join the fun.  So a little dancing sequence is in order. If I pull that off, perhaps I can finally call myself an animator :).

All of this work on the models and animations might be in vain, though.  I am in the middle of negotiating a collaboration with a local artist who is very much into this kind of game and has expressed a lot of enthusiasm for this project.  If that goes through, he will be the one creating the content for the game while I focus on the programming side. That will change things a lot, but it would be great to get the help and improve the chances of the game being released and being a success. Fingers crossed!