1. Ideation:
The idea for Alien Blast came from the classic arcade game, Whack-A-Mole, which was invented back in 1976 by a man called Aaron Fechter. The original game consists of a small
plastic hammer that you have to use on the arcade machine. On the machine, there are various holes spread out all over the surface, and when you player starts to play, small moles
pop their heads out at the player must whack the moles to get a score. We took this idea and turned it more into a digital mode and then went further to make the game our own, by
developing our own story. We had to think how it would stand out amongst other similar games. We came up with our story then thought about how we would start to produce the
game.
Pre-production:
In pre production, we had to think about what our aliens were going to look like, as we didnʼt have to worry about what the player looked like, as you never saw the avatar that you play
as. Some inspiration was the monster B.o.B from “Monsters vs Aliens” , I then went onto try start making some ideas for aliens, I started from scratch in photoshop and then showed
my results to the team, they thought they were good, but in later testing, when the aliens were put into our game, they were too long and didnʼt fit the planets holes, so Annabel then
went on to try create a more rounded alien.
We also designed some red aliens which were different from the green aliens, they could not be ʻWhackedʼ but had to be avoided, it was our own little twist on the game. We also had
to think of how eliminating all the aliens on one level would progress the story. The basic idea for our story was, aliens were invading. So we thought how we could keep this going on
for a while with other levels. In the end, our story was that the astronaut (The player) had been sent into space on a special mission to push back the impending alien invasion from
reaching earth. You must go from planet to planet, eradicating the alien threat on each planet, until the push the aliens our of our solar system.
Thinking of what to do for art, for each individual level would have been quite easy. The level would change, when you moved planet, and there would be a different theme for each
level. The background would have little animated stars in the background, just for some background art.

2. Production
Because of our well prepped pre production, we could move into production swiftly. We each had our own roles to do, Faye was to start working in game salad and start trying to get
the basics mechanics to work, Annabel was continuing to work on the art and design, I was finding sound effects and creating our own music to go over the top of the gameplay. We
progressed together, so Annabel would send art that she had made, to Faye, then Faye would put the art into game salad and then the game would start to slowly come together.
Thought the production we did have some problems in terms of programming, there were a few ares that Faye found hard to program and then resulted in some bugs. As Faye was
happy with what she had made, she had then asked me for the music, so I sent over the music I had made, and see put it into game salad in the appropriate places, and then added
some sound effects for when you had killed the aliens, and for various other things, such as losing the game or touching a red alien. We had looped the song, so the song would play
when the player played the game and then when the credits would role.
Post Production
For post production, we mostly concentrated on fixing some of the bugs, and even when we had fixed most the bugs, there were still parts of the game that were working, but we
thought we could make better, like the speed at which the aliens came out, the score you had to reach for the level, and how many red ones came out. It was towards the end when
Annabel had sent the pictures of the stars to Faye, then Faye added them in and made them animate. This just brings a good feeling to the game and gives in a better atmosphere.