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ALIEN STORM
Graphics - sunteam_paul and sunteam_ian : Program - sunteam_mike : Music - sunteam_paul
The first time I played Alien Storm in the arcades, I was very indifferent to it. The second time, a switch flipped in my brain and I absolutely loved it - it was essentially Golden Axe with aliens, what's not to like? Because sunteam_ian and I shared the same love of the game, this became one of our largest projects. It began as a full screen conversion of the game, but after a fair bit of programming, it became clear that AMOS just ran too slow to make everything playable enough to satisfy us. We were in a pickle. Then came the genius idea of shrinking the whole game down so everything was smaller. Better still, we could make that an attraction of the game and have it displayed as though you were playing it on a Sega Game Gear. And so GG Alien Storm was born. We were very influenced by the presentation of PC Engine CD-Rom games at the time, so we designed some elaborate intro scenes to punctuate the gameplay. Shrinking the screen down gave some improvements, but the promise of the AMOS Compiler making things run silky smooth just failed to deliver. The game remained a bit slow, but just within the levels of tolerance. The sad thing is, despite most of the game being programmed and 90% of graphics being drawn, it was never finished. The downloadable ADF file below will auto-run and shows a build of the game up to the 'Gilling' monster. We had progressed beyond this, but I can't locate the code.
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TITLE SCREEN
Well, this title screen seems a bit of a cheap cop-out...
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...so we went one better. |
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The GG version was just shrunk down. Gotta love that little eye. |
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Luckily the player select designed for full screen worked just as well on the GG version so no changes were needed. |
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ABANDONED ART
Some principal work on the ranking screen that you get after Game Over.
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Ranking screen foreground |
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Ranking screen background. It scrolls up in a parallaxy fashion. |
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The cast of judges (Gilius Thunderhead included). Adding the ranking screen was eventually dropped. |
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At one point, we had this whole alien 'Greys' plot thing that we wanted to incorporate. That fell by the wayside, but we still used the EBE head as a loading screen. |
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Early on, we had planned to make the shooting stages as well. This is an early mock-up, but it became too complex so we decided that concentrating on the standard action levels was a better idea (they are the core game after all). |
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Oh look, it's our buddy King Heap from our abandoned Splatterhouse game. He was going to make an appearance as an end of game boss, but we wanted something better in the end and he was left out. |
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I don't really remember much about this. I assume it was for an end credits sequence, or alternate ranking screen at some point. |
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A rough attempt to see if we could draw the characters from their status images. With a bit more work it might have been OK, but we went a different route. Gordon just started to look too much like Elvis. |
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UNFINISHED PREVIEW DEMO
Like the Coming Attractions demo we did, we thought to make a snappy little demo advertising the coming of GG Alien Storm. It would feature some neat animations of a Game Gear and some screenshots of the game, but ultimately was never completed.
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