Alien: Isolation is a single-player action-adventure game with stealth and survival horror features, in which the player controls the protagonist, Amanda Ripley, from a first-person perspective.

Reel

The best of my animation work from Alien: Isolation. I was responsible for animating the Alien, both for gameplay and in-game cinematics. It was one heck of a challenge both artistically and technically, but great fun and a massive privilege to be given this responsibility. A full reel breakdown can be found on the Vimeo link.

Alien: Isolation received several year-end awards, including PC Gamer‘s Game of the Year 2014, Audio Achievement at the 11th British Academy Games Awards, Best Audio at the 15th Game Developers Choice Awards, and four awards at the 14th National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers. The game also appeared on several year-end lists of the best games of 2014. It was ranked 1st in The Daily Telegraph‘s the 25 best video games of 2014, 2nd in Empire‘s the 10 Best Games Of The Year, 2nd in Time‘s Top 10 Video Games of 2014, 4th in The Guardian‘s Top 25 Games of 2014, 3rd in Reader’s top 50 games of 2014 by Eurogamer,  and in Daily Mirror‘s the 10 best games of 2014. In 2015, Alien: Isolation was ranked 7th in Kotaku‘s list of the 10 Best Horror Games.

Alien in-game Locomotion

In-game animation of the Alien’s locomotion. A large part of the Alien’s gameplay revolved around him being able to go anywhere at any speed. A three dimensional blended solution was developed to which I provided assets for and iterated upon to achieve the game requirements.

The goal here was not only to make sure we satisfied gameplay but that the Alien felt like a living breathing creature, capable of anything through it’s movement.

All assets provided for this technical solution were keyframed by myself. Blending forward motion along Z of varied speed, parametric turns at those speeds and varied speeds along X. The solution was used for both when the Alien is bipedal and when he is crawling in the vent. The tail is an in-game physics solution.

This video shows examples of the range speeds the Alien was capable of, whether that be forward motion alone, forward and turning, sideways, backwards or a mixture of all blended together. All of these full body animations are also combined with multiple animation layers for face detail, fingers, upper body and head additives.

Credit goes to: Tobias Kleanthous (Animation Programmer), Chris Le Roux (Senior Animator) & Helen Cranston (Animator) who all played a massive part in the development of this work and tech alongside myself.

Alien Reveal

This was the first in-game reveal of the Alien and all animation is this sequence is keyframed by myself. There was a great collaboration of people working on it from conception through to the final piece. Much thanks goes to all my CA colleagues who helped critique this and who were a part of producing this scene.