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The Alien Isolation board game is one of the oldest projects I still have the original files for, and I’m still rather pleased with it. It was a university assignment wherein we were tasked with the challenge of taking an existing video game and translating it into a board game. I was assigned Creative Assembly’s 2014 title: Alien Isolation.
Alien Isolation Interview
Many other teams took the approach of attempting to simulate the basic mechanics of their chosen game, but I took a different approach. I looked at Alien Isolation from the user-experience perspective; what is the emotional experience of playing Alien Isolation and what is the atmosphere? Logically, the game is meant to make players feel on edge, and to not know what to trust; to feel isolated. A lot of my inspiration came from this video (left) of an interview with the developers where they detail a lot of their own inspirations for designing the original game (particularly at around 13:40).
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The video is owned by James Caddick, AKA Caddicarus.
I took inspiration from Betrayal at House on the Hill and Space Hulk for this game. I used Event cards to weave in creepy unsettling narrative into the experience of the game; and really make the player feel like a trapped rat in a horror house. The graphic design on the cards is primitive, but the narrative attached really helped to give players that eerie isolated atmosphere.
An added challenge was the fact that this is a multiplayer experience being made from a single-player game, which naturally would go against the sense of isolation that the developers of the original game were going for, so I decided to assign each player some secret “roles” inspired from the movie. Some roles would want to help other players, while others would give the impression of being friendly but would have secret ulterior motives, so this brought a new social aspect of the game; trying to figure out who your friends really are in the game.
In a sense, the role system coupled with the map design and event cards, made players feel alone; even though they were playing with a room full of people. The conversations that took place between players were exactly what I wanted; people yelling across the table about who they suspect as being which role and who everyone else should trust or try to get killed.
Another major mechanic was the Alien itself, which I used as an emergent mechanic. The first player to die through an event card would become the Alien; so for a while at least, the game is all about the build-up. The Alien then gains his own set of objectives; all of which are of course hostile to all roles bar one. This massively increases the tension; all human players would now have a common enemy as well as an unknown level of enemies within their team.
For this assignment I received an 82/100 mark, awarding it a First-class grade, with one lecturer stating that mine was one of the best projects they’ve had submitted for the module. My work has since been used as an example for future classes in the university.
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Reference:
Creative Assembly 2014, Alien Isolation, video game, multiple platforms, SEGA West, United Kingdom.