I haven't changed anything about their sprites yet, aside from taking them out and reimporting them into Construct. I'm going to change the colours on them slightly, the blue and red lighting on it are a bit too bright for me.

I want to stick with the stock look of the characters in Aliens, so that they're easily recognisable physically as I won't be using any voice recordings.

I was thinking about throwing in a reference to Prometheus, maybe a glimpse of an Engineer or a special boss enemy; the Deacon alien that burst out of the engineer at the end of the movie.

I've been keeping in key with the information available on this wiki for the technical details (M41A Pulse Rifle's magazine holds 99 rounds, grenade launcher holds 4 grenades, etc) so I'll be using that for the height of the xenomorphs (they're just a little on the small side using that first sprite sheet you linked me, but that's easily fixed).

I've uploaded the latest version; I'm really feeling around at the minute to see what sort of style will work.

You definitely nailed the greased-up, aged CRT look.

Oh wow, the visual style is fantastically retro!

Oh fantastic, thanks railslave! I've been wondering how I'll tackle animating the xenomorphs, but these will be excellent as a base!

About the mouse/keyboard controls, I'd prefer a gamepad too but I don't have one right now. If I get one then I will incorporate support for it into the game for sure as it's my preferred method of play too for this type of game.

Hello everyone!

This is the beginnings of "Escape From LV-426"; a game set on LV-426 from James Cameron's film "Aliens". You play as Ellen Ripley, who must escort Newt safely to the USS Sulaco; preventing the Xenomorphs from capturing Newt. This game will not stick rigidly to the canon of the film.

The splash screen:

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/TFioE.png" border="0">

The controls:

A & D or Left & Right arrow key: movement

Spacebar or Up arrow key: jump

Q: tells Newt to wait/come to Ripley

Left Mouse Button: shoot Pulse Rifle

Right Mouse Button: shoot under-barrel grenade launcher

R: Reload Pulse Rifle

Issues I know about

*When the layout restarts you don't start with all your ammo replenished. F5 works a treat though ;)

*Newt gets stuck occasionally. I'm working on this.

*No sound effects for the grenade launcher and the grenade explosion

Play the early alpha version here!

I've started working on the round based section of the game (known as The Depths) to give myself a break from the other stuff. The Depths is a round based part of the game accessible at any time, which gets progressively more difficult as the player fights through each "floor".

Each floor consists of 8 time constrained (1 minute) rounds and a final boss; once the player has defeated the final boss of the floor, the plug at the centre of the room is destroyed, allowing the player to jump down to the next floor.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Wsfdm.png" border="0" />

This pretty much sums things up.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/GPRkA.png" border="0" />

Thank you for this Kyatric.

New post on the devblog.

Also, ninja skellie. Fear his kunai!

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/HWSLb.png" border="0">

Here is the code in question:

<img src="http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/6732/18f427193a05400f96c639d.png" border="0" />

The issue I'm having is that although my characters move independently of each other (in different directions etc), they don't animate correctly. You can see the boolean system I'm using to trigger what state the skeleton is in; this works if there is just a single skeleton in the layout, but if I put more than one into the layout the system breaks down. It seems as if they're altering each others booleans, but this shouldn't be happening.

I've unleashed a new nightmare though... In trying to group them all into a family and animate them individually I've managed to break their animations. I'm thinking I'll have to do them all one by one now...

But first, LOTS of coffee!