XENOTARIUM

A Collection of Strange Aliens

What is this?

First of all, welcome to the Xenotarium!

On this page, I post little pixel-art aliens created by a program I wrote.

The Program

I was inspired to create this project by the wonderful Space Invaders Alien Generator at (EXTERNAL LINK) https://alien-sunset.neocities.org/bots/aliens. I've always enjoyed visiting the site and looking at all the little aliens.

Around the same time, I started programming video games — first with PICO-8 and now with LÖVE2D. That's when I got the idea to create my own alien generator as a programming exercise. It took a few days, but eventually, I finished the tool and was happy with the results.

Each alien consists of four body parts and uses three colors. First, the program generates a head, a torso with legs, a pair of arms, and a set of eyes. Then, it assigns three colors. The first two are used to color the alien's body, while the second and third are used for the eyes. And that's it!

Over time, I grew so fond of these strange little aliens that I decided to dedicate a small website to them. And that's how the Xenotarium came to be.

The Images

Right now, I post four images a day: three regular alien images and one Generations image.

Aliens

It's simple: each image features 15 randomly generated aliens. I let my program generate the aliens and save the images. That's it! No hand-picking, no favorites. Everyone has different tastes, and in the end, every alien is beautiful in its own way.

Generations

A little family tree. First, the program generates a top row of eight aliens. Then, one child is generated for each pair of aliens. During this process, chance determines which parent's body parts and colors each child inherits.

This process is repeated for two more generations, resulting in a family tree of aliens that combine traits from their ancestors.

The Stats

The generator currently has the following body parts available:

This gives a total of 110,500 possible combinations of body parts.

There are also 31 available colors (32 including black, but I use black for the background, not for the aliens themselves). Since no color is repeated during generation, there are 31 × 30 × 29 = 26,970 possible color combinations.

All in all, this gives us 2,980,185,000 possible alien combinations!

I'll keep adding new body parts and updating these stats along the way. The possibilities will only keep growing!