[animal531]

You're not wrong, using simpler 2d tech would have made the process a lot easier, but this way it was a good intro and learning experience for making something bigger in 3d which will eventually require a lot of the same optimisations (and a lot more).

The only basic part missing in his article would be along the lines of combining textures into an atlas and dynamically modifying UV's so that for example the UFO's could have had different shapes and colours.