Artist’s Statement:
The game was inspired by Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” and other modded games with different skins. This was my first time focusing on only the sky and clouds in Super Mario Bros. With no other disruptions, it feels slightly different from the original piece. It becomes free, fresh, and slow, which I totally ignored in the original. So, I come up with an idea of what would happen if I only change the skin in Space Invaders.
I choose Space Invaders because it was one of the games that influenced the following game market a lot (also the one that shapes Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Super Mario Bros). The game has many basic components like a controllable individual, enemies, and projectiles. Some subversive ideas jump into my mind: What if I try to switch the colors and figures of different alignments? Some common traits of enemies that players do not recognize may be revealed in the character of the player.
What I changed in this game was the color and firing rate of the enemies. I made the enemies green and the player red. I felt a little bit weird because usually, the color of the player was green or blue and the enemies were red. This time, I felt like I was controlling a bad guy fighting against a good group. Originally, the story was about a group of aliens invading the earth, and the player needs to protect the earth. With different skins, this version becomes an alien trying to protect its homeland from humans.
During the playtest, one interesting fact is that when the player faces the missile rain, the player prefers to hide behind the shelter rather than take down the plane. It turns out some habits of players that if they directly meet a risk, they would try to avoid it first. The shelter was used to protect the player when the player made mistakes in the original one, so the player could focus on killing enemies. It showed another strategy in this version that the player focused on surviving.
