another look back at old concept art
now the original title for the game was "Zortch Maximum against The Brain Sucking Aliens"
and the inspiration was that brain sucking aliens is a sort of cliche in sci-fi
but funnily enough when you search for a movie that actually features this you hardly find any
this is kind of like the cliche of naming a dog 'Fido' - it's such a cliche that no dogs are named 'Fido' anymore
the thing was that I only had a title and some ideas for the plot
but only had some vague ideas on how the aliens would look like:
- I didn't want them to have legs and wanted some sort of lovecraftian abstract creature
- they of course had to be green
- no eyes - they have perception and senses just not as we know it
- and also they had to be intelligent and be able to talk to you somehow
the last part was kind of important - it was inspired by a fact I read about the original alien
in an early script the alien turns out to be able to mimic voices and make a log in Ripley's voice
and I just loved the idea so much: instead of a dumb killing machine you are up against a smart killing machine
(one which runs by on a completely different idea of morals and logic - you won't talk yourself out of this one)
so not only they can overpower but outthink others as well - a creature that is really really dangerous
this somehow led to an idea of "Hostel meets Alien"
something about aliens that run a hotel to trap people
(so the game is a mish-mash of several ideas - some of them worked and some of them not so much)
anyway without further ado:
here is a selfie of a brainsucker -- so what led to this design?
some extra concepts like vehicles and bosses driving vehicles were dropped as they were beyond my capabilities to implement
there were plans for intro and cutscenes - but in the end it seemed better to leave things vague
I kind of forgot about the air cream joke -- maybe it's better that these were cut 🤔
"Next up: concept art of Zortch herself and more bad mspaint comics!"