Alien Invasion

When I was younger - age six or so - I watched my dad play a game called G-Nome. G-Nome was a battlemech game - you had massive walking vehicles you rode around in and blew stuff up with. You could eject and fight on foot, or force an enemy out of their vehicle and commandeer it - plenty of options. As a six year old, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I began to draw different battle scenes on paper. They weren't the best quality - I had to label some of the objects just to make it obvious what they were - the most memorable being the "bride control building", by which I meant "bridge control building". Give me a break, though - I was six. Six year-olds are kind of expected to misspell "bridge", and I think I did a pretty good job with the other two words.

Box art for G-Nome

As I grew older, the CD unfortunately got lost, and I never got to play it. To compensate, I began making my own games - and of course I needed someone to play with. With very limited computer access, no game consoles and nothing to watch on TV, I made pinball games on paper, D&D style games, and all sorts of other things, drawing inspiration from things I'd seen, and making up new games of my own. I could spend several posts listing them all off, but you get the idea - I made games to keep my brother Gregory and I occupied. Plus, it was fun.

One year while he was getting his haircut (and I was... ten? eleven, possibly?), I sat down in front of him (he was fidgety, needed to hold still) and started to draw him a picture. Now, note - I'm not a good artist at all. I can make things somewhat recognizable, but that's about it. Anyway, I drew an airplane and a flying saucer fighting each other in the night sky, with the plane launching missiles and the UFO firing lasers. Greg loved it. It kept his attention, too, which was what I had wanted.

After the haircut, he took the picture, came to me and said something along the lines of, "Turn it into a game. It'd be cool." I thought about it, and decided, yes, it'd be cool. So I started working on figuring out how I was going to do it.

The first Alien Invasion games were simple - one person played as Earth, and the other person played as Aliens. Alien UFOs had four weapons, but couldn't aim well. Earth planes had three weapons, which fired forwards, but were widely spaced - one under the cockpit and one on each wing. We would decide where to place the ships and draw them on a sheet of paper. After that, we each took turns firing the weapons of one of our undamaged ships. I would draw dashed lines for the planes (machine gun fire), and solid lines for the UFOs (lasers). Anywhere weapons hit, I'd draw an explosion, and sometimes a trail of black smoke. (The paper got messy very, very quickly.) The winner was the one with the most ships surviving to the end of the game.

Unfortunately, with so many rules, this game got old quickly, and Greg was losing interest. I decided to redesign it from the ground up.

The next game - Alien Invasion II - featured a huge catalog of ships - possibly 50 or more - and each with different designs, weapon types, shields, and costs (I made us have to buy ships at the start of the game, to keep things fair - better ships cost more). We would place them in the same way - but this time, not above an earthbound forest - this time, the battles took place in deep space.

It was a huge success. Gregory and I played the game 20 or more times, despite the amount of time it took to get all the ships purchased and drawn. I regret I can't find the folder we used to keep all our games in... I'm guessing it got lost when we moved. I do have one remaining picture, though.

The game was a mess: Shields all over the place (I had to keep count of how many had been destroyed for each ship), weapons self-destructing before they hit allies, huge explosions...It was insane how much could go on on one piece of paper. I regret that the above is one of the least-exciting of our games... Usually there were twice as many ships. It's also poorly-kept - you can see the wrinkles (and a large stain) without any trouble at all.

Anyway, I want to turn Alien Invasion into a game you could play on the computer - play with friends, design your own ships, load and save, etc. It would be incredible fun, I think... though somewhat difficult to program. I'm working on it, though. I'll keep you updated on occasion.