Galactic Attack!

“Galactic Attack!” is a simulated 8-bit arcade game inspired by retro classics like Space Invaders and Galaga. The animation was presented at the 2024 Images in Motion Film Festival.

This project was an exercise in world-building and visual storytelling. I carefully created assets that both fit the art style and communicated information with limited visual data. A major part of the project involved conceptualizing and communicating the game’s rules to the audience. Before the animation process started, I carefully decided what each enemy type would do, how they would act, how scoring would be calculated, and how shields and health would function. Originally, the game had many more mechanics and enemy types, but I later simplified the concept since my original idea could feel overwhelming and unintelligible to first-time viewers. While the finished product appears bare-bones and familiar, it still took a great deal of forethought to make the illusion convincing.

Original Score:

The background music is an original song that I composed for this project. I took inspiration from classic video game battle music, orchestral compositions, and American marches to create a soundtrack reminiscent of the galactic empires of early science fiction. This background track is actually much longer than the animation itself and was arranged to be easily looped, allowing me to take as much time as I needed to tell my story.

Additionally, the game completion jingle and the score counter sound effect were both original productions for this animation. With all of these audio assets, the primary challenge was maintaining immersion by making everything sound like it belonged in the world I was creating. I used bitcrushing and compression to capture that classic retro video game sound. I applied this same strategy to many of the sound effects in the animation, most of which were licensed from free audio libraries and modified to fit the theme. In the end, sound design and scoring played a major part in making this animation believable and professional.

Illustration:

Photoshop Assets:

Shown here are some of the many pixel art assets designed for “Galactic Attack!”

Pixel art requires an entirely different approach than traditional illustration. With such limited fidelity, every pixel counts, and thoughtful use of scale, form, and color is necessary to effectively convey an idea to the audience. All assets for this animation were designed in Adobe Photoshop and animated in Adobe After Effects. For example, the explosion effect was drawn as six static frames in Photoshop that were then sequenced in After Effects to depict a convincing pixelated fireball. Most assets were hand-drawn, but a few, like the space background, were larger assets with a pixelation filter added to match the pixel density of the rest of the scene.

Consistent pixel density was the most important detail in this project. When animating pixelated assets, it’s incredibly easy for objects to break from the pixel grid or have a different pixel resolution than other parts of the composition. The result of just one of these mistakes immediately gives away the illusion and makes the animation feel unprofessional. For this project, I immediately established that every in-game pixel would be exactly forty square pixels in After Effects. I calculated exactly how far each asset needed to move over a set number of frames to prevent any deviation from the grid. Even the seemingly larger assets, like the user interface elements on the left, have a pixel scale exactly two times the scale of the other assets in the scene, making them mesh perfectly with the grid despite their larger size.

Conclusion:

Despite its visual simplicity, this project took incredible attention to detail, calculation, and planning. The end goal is that all this hard work goes unnoticed, and the finished product feels effortless and natural. “Galactic Attack!” is not a real video game, but this animation makes you believe it could be. That’s the result of hours of world-building, illustration, sound design, scoring, and animation all coming together in harmony.