Are you looking at me?

A lot of the feedback we got from people who played Cletus Clay at Eurogamer last year made it clear that you wanted to see more variety in our aliens. We are listening, and we are currently working on creating additional squishy pink extraterrestrial lovelies for Cletus and his brother Emmet to pummel.

As with a lot of our models, the alien is animated in sections: we have alien body animations, alien head animations and alien weapon animations. To add some variety we are concentrating on giving some of the aliens different head types.
To achieve this we are using a mixture of Photoshop wizardry and new clay models. For example, Mr One-Eyed-Alien (third from the left) was created using the original alien head and some Photoshop work. The head with the segmented eye stalks (second from the left) was created using part of the original alien head and new clay eye stalks that were photographed and digitally added.

Anthony is very keen that the alien heads are different enough to provide variety, but similar enough to make it clear that they are all part of the same Alien race. For example, Mr Three-Eyed-Alien (fourth from the left) is perhaps a bit too different from his Alien brethren and so probably won’t make the cut.

Anthony and Sarah are both brainstorming to come up with as many different and weird looking alien heads as possible. Not all of them will make it into the actual game as only the very best will receive the Anthony seal of approval.

Now you can put the legs together. To make sure they are relatively strong, blend the clay together underneath the arm. The smallest arm joint should be the one nearest the body.

Arrange your arms under the crab body to line them up. Once you have the body over the top and the arms are where you want them press down on the body. Then turn the crab over and blend the joints.

You have nearly finished your crab. All you need to do now is roll out 6 thin sausages. These are your crab’s legs. Just like you did with the arms of your crab, arrange the legs under the body and when you are happy that they are in the right place, press down on the body. Now turn your crab over and make sure the joins are good and strong.

Now you can get creative. You can give your crab antenna, a smile, a little set of jaws, anything you like.

After my workshop at the Bradford Animation Festival I thought it would be a good idea to pop up a tutorial for making a crab. This was something my lovely students seemed to enjoy making and were able to put their own creative stamp on their crab design, we even had a grinning crab at one stage.

I know a blue crab is not the norm but I couldn’t locate my block of red clay!

To start you need to make the body. You can experiment with different shapes if you like but I’m sticking with a basic crab body shape. Roll a large ball of clay (the size of a large marble) out between your palms (1). Pinch it to give it a bit of a taper (2). Use your finger tips to press what will look like bite marks around the top of the body (3).

Now you roll 6 balls; 2 large, 2 medium and 2 relatively small. These are going to be your crab’s arms.

Take your biggest arm balls and make them into this shape. These are going to contain the claws.

Now you make your claws. Roll out 4 smallish sized balls, 2 very small and 2 slightly bigger (6). Form the bigger balls into your top claws. Shape them into a claw shape with the tips of your fingers (7).

1.Start by making the base of your sandcastle. The bigger your base the more towers you can fit on it so it is up to you how epic you want your castle to be. I stuck with just a couple of towers but there is no reason why you couldn’t build King Arthur’s dream palace!

2.Create your first tower by rolling quite a fat little sausage. Put it vertically on to your base and attach it with a bit of extra clay or just by pushing the end of the tower into the base with your fingers.

3.Roll a smaller sausage. This should be as thick as you want your turrets to be. I made the mistake of making this sausage too small the first time I made the turrets which meant I had to chop off the top of the tower and start over. If you aren’t sure about the size of your turrets, make a test tower that isn’t attached to your base. This is also useful to have if you want to practice making windows and doors for your castle. Once you have your smaller sausage that is the right thickness for your turrets, wrap it around the top of your tower. Blend it to the tower with your fingers.

4.Now you need to mark out your turrets. Check that you can remove every other turret without leaving a huge gap or two turrets together. Once you are ready you can remove every other turret which should leave you with a real castle like tower.

5.Next step is adding any doors and windows. All you need here is a pen. For the windows you just need to stick the pen tip into the clay and drag down very slightly. Any doors can be done the same way although you will need to scrape away any excess clay.

6.No sandcastle is complete without any flags. Wire is the best way of making the flag poles. Simply cut a small length of wire ready for your flag. Make a small triangle of clay and attach it to the wire. Then just place your flag on top of a tower, just like you would with a real sandcastle.

Your sandcastle is now ready to sit majestically on the beach.