Alien 3 Rebooted: It's time to do it right. (The Alien in our poster is a 3D model rendered by John in DAZ Studio).
RIPLEY: “It’s just down there, in the basement.”
AARON: ” The whole place is a basement.”
RIPLEY: “It’s a metaphor.”
Alien3.
Conventions both exhaust and inspire you. In the aftermath of Phenomenon, Pip and I have decided on our major joint writing project for 2012. We’re going to tackle an rgp reboot of Alien3, the deeply confused successor to the SF classics Alien and Aliens. Cyberpunk author William Gibson did an early script for Alien3, but the project went through production hell with multiple writers and directors, changes of direction, and massive interference from Fox Studio.
We love the Alien series (though lets not talk about AVP), we respect Ripley. and we’re not going to kill off Hicks and Newt in the first thirty seconds as Alien3 did. Our reboot takes the William Gibson draft as our inspiration, though of course an RPG game has to be very different to a movie script, and we have a few ideas of our own.
The Alien series of films exhibit a high degree of self-awareness, typified by the Ripley quote above. We think the challenge plays to our design strengths: an atmosphere of constant, gritty fear and tension; character insight and development; and a chance to ask and play out a whole series of ideas about gender, embodiment, moral courage, and … parenthood! All with big guns and flashing emergency lights.
Pip and I will be posting on the module’s development over the next few months, and using it as an example of how we design a systemless game. While we won’t be giving away spoilers, we can share ideas knowing that everyone is familiar with the game background and genre. For now, we’re watching the movies and reading Dark Horse comics, the Colonial Marines Technical Manual, and a host of critical books and essays from cultural and film studies. One particular inspiration is Stephen Mulhall’s On Film: Thinking in Action, which explores how the Alien Quadrilogy grapples with a host of issues surrounding human identity.
Note: The poster above is a work-in-progress.
Chi Lin in Sinop. Designed and rendered in DAZ Studio, Postworked in Photoshop. John Hughes, Jan 2011.
From the “Waterfall” draft …
Chi Lin had green eyes, a fine pair of boots and a weakness for lost causes.
Her boots were what you noticed first.
Her eyes, if you were lucky enough to be close and hold her gaze, were a shimmering cascade of jade and jungle green, flecked with the blue of high mountain lakes and the elephant blue-grey of monsoon clouds. ‘Aji eyes’, her friend Sharak had once described them, ‘eyes of promise’.
I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sounds of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments …
—Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’.
Not a photo, but a render project I created in DAZ Studio while testing a new engine called Reality. The quote is from Radiohead – it’s been one of those years. 🙂
We have sown the Wind. We shall harvest the Storm. Come the Hurricane!
Myth-O-Logic 