I'm happy to say that I've successfully added one of the two themes I chose to my game. The aliens! They are created at specific points in the map and run towards the player until they collide. At that point the screen will fade out (no battle swirl yet) and a battle will start. It's interesting to note that, just like Earthbound, other aliens can still continue to run towards the player while the screen is fading out. And if they make contact, then they too will be added to the battle.

The battle itself isn't anything special yet though. It just displays the in-battle sprites of the aliens and you can attack by pressing the V button. Also the aliens won't attack back yet, which might be a bit disappointing. You can also change the selected alien by pressing left or right, but which alien is selected isn't displayed in any way yet. So that's not particularly useful. By the way I drew the in-battle sprite for the alien completely by myself. It won't win any awards, but I like to think it's pretty decent.

Another thing to note is that I recently started using co-routines for animations in Python. Effectively they are just generators that use the yield-statement to give control back to the rest of the update-tick. They are quite effective in preventing the need for stateful member variables (fadeTimer, coolDown, etc.). I might write an article about it later if there doesn't exist any yet that already does a proper job at explaining them.

Download link:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ciwguyrx82844l4/main_v0.0.2.zip
(Reminder: press V to attack!)