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Aliens: Redacted - An early retrospective
- Jul 4, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: May 9, 2025
I never got into game development for any sort of validation from other people. Don't get me wrong, hearing feedback, both positive and negative, is extremely valuable and I'm always grateful for anyone who takes time out of their day to both play any of my games and also to care enough to give feedback. But when I first decided to give this game dev thing a shot it was because I was trying to find a way to express myself.
So any project that I take on, I do it mainly because I have a cool idea for a story, or art style or gameplay hook that best expresses myself and I say all this knowing that I haven't really released anything substantial. Needless to say then, I was more than pleasantly surprised when I released Aliens: Redacted, my fan made, 2.5d shooter love letter to a franchise that I adore so much was met with overwhelmingly positive reaction by people that played it. Although the download and view count is relatively modest in relation to other videogames (as you'll see in this retrospective) it is, BY FAR, my most successful game that I have released to date. This retrospective then, is mainly for me to look back at its development and release to try and figure out why it was successful and to try and take away pointers as to what to do (and what not to do) in my future projects...so lets get into it!
Development and release...
The idea of doing a Doom style shooter set in the Alien universe came from a mix of me learning the EFPSE engine, a really cool little game engine created to specifically make those type of retro shooters mixed with me binging the Alien films one after the other! It made me think about the old classic Alien shooters like Alien Trilogy and Alien Resurrection on PS1. Both games, although flawed, were absolute classics for me growing up and I have many memories of watching my dad play these as I was far to scared to play them myself. I feel like this is a sentiment shared with many gamers who also grew up with this, as these type of games hold a lot of nostalgia and I personally thought that it was time to try and recapture that nostalgia in a new retro shooter set in this universe, albeit with some new changes (and slightly better graphics).
I set myself a modest 3 month cycle for this, I didn't want to bog myself down with anything large and the longer a development continues the higher the danger of 'feature creep' starts to set in, so I made sure that I was focused with my scope and what I wanted to implement. This project was unlike any other that I've started before. Not only did I almost immediately know the vision that I wanted to do and mechanics I wanted to implement but I came across almost zero complications, everything just seemed to fit perfectly together from the art style to the sprites to the level design to the music. To quote Todd Howard - "it just works". Now, I'm not naïve, I've started MANY a project that I struggled with one aspect to another so I know that this is something of a weird discrepancy of what usually happens with game development but I'm definitely not complaining, it was so refreshing and fun to experience a development cycle like this.
I'm not a prolific 3D modeller and in fact I only started learning modelling for this specific project. So a lot of the smaller models in the game (boxes and computer terminals) I created and textured myself with the larger models (alien statues and space jockey navigation station) I downloaded from external sites. Some people take issue with using other models but the way I see it, as long as I wasn't infringing in any copyright it was beneficial for me with a limited time frame to use these models, plus they are better than anything I could have created on my own.
Originally I never had a specific release date in mind. Although I had set myself a tentative 3 month development cycle it could be extended if needed but as I get closer and closer to finishing the game it dawned on me. Alien day, the one day every year where fans come together to celebrate the franchise was on April 26th, which just happened to coincide with the end of my development cycle. In fact, I managed to finish the development of the game 2 weeks prior to the date of Aliens day which gave me valuable time for bug fixing game testing.
So I had my release date set on 26th April and now it was time to decide where I was going to market my game. I knew I didn't want to make a massive deal of it, at the end of the day it is a short game in a small budget and development time so I was more casual about marketing this one. Firstly I made pages on both Itch.io and GameJolt as I know that these are the predominant website for Indie game traffic. I decided against releasing on steam as this game will be free and I couldn't justify spending the £100 to put my game up on steam, plus it may have some legal issues given that it is a fan game of an already established franchise.
I wanted the pages to look as professional as possible with nice screenshots, good art design and an informative description. I feel that a massive turn off when browsing a lot of these games is a page that is poorly designed. You need to try and catch the eye of any potential players in the very short window that your game is actually shown on the 'New' list or something similar. I created my own header image a long with scrolling background image, I took some in-game screenshots and touched the lighting up slightly in order to enhance the image when viewing the page. I also dedicated some time to writing a proper description for the game. Both the story elements and also the key selling points of the game itself. The extra 2 weeks of development time also allowed me to take some time to create a trailer for the release of the game. I feel like a good game trailer does a lot to make it seem more professional to potential players and also allows people to see if it is a type of game they want to play prior to downloading the game itself.
In terms of where I was going to promote the title come release day I wanted to make sure that I was targeting the correct demographic and audience so I decided to create a post on r/LV426 on reddit, a long with the Alien wiki website. I also posted on my usual social media accounts.
Post-release...
Making the decision to release the game on Alien day was the best decision that I could have made for this project. Creating posts on both Reddit on the Alien Wiki, promoting both my day and celebrating the day as a whole seemed to really gain eye balls on my project. I think people we're really craving new Alien content on that specific day so having a brand new short experience like this seemed to really resonate with many fans and I was also receiving a lot of really nice and positive reviews which is something I was not expecting but was very appreciative of.
While my posts on various sites and social media platforms were gaining some traction it didn't really start until a website called Gaming On Linux made an article about my game and I started to receive a lot of the traffic from their users.
This came as a complete surprise to me and I was very humbled to have created something that that someone thought worthy enough to create an article to promote it and that people thought worthy enough to check out. You can see some graphs below and comparisons of my traffic over those initial launch hours.
The good and the bad...
I received a lot of very valuable feedback from players which I can take into my future projects. The atmosphere and level design were praised by almost everyone and this echoed my own thoughts at the time of release, it was one of the aspects of the game I was very happy about pre-release and I'm glad that people thought the same. One of the main criticisms were the long and un-skippable intro video. I wanted to convey a decent backstory to the game so decided to do this in the form of a computer terminal (complete with the 80's black and green aesthetic) but as I developed it further the video became quite long (about 2-3 minutes) and I never even thought about adding the ability to skip the video. People were not please with having to sit through this and wanted to get straight into the action. I probably lost a few players because of this and is something I would 100% change if I could re-do it.
I also felt the enemy AI was lacking, I tried to do my best to add some ranged/melee attacks and have the enemy hide if you fire on them. If I had more time however, I would have focused on this aspect more to make the gunplay feel better and more immersive.
That is pretty much everything! Now that the dust has settled I can proudly say I am very happy with the release of the game, the reception it received and the analytics of downloads and views (even if they are pretty modest numbers) it has really given me the motivation to move on to other projects and I can't wait to show you guys what else I've been working on.
thank you for reading :)
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