“Now in its third year, Off The Map challenges budding designers to use collections from the British Library as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media.
Off The Map competition accompanies the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition on Alice in Wonderland. Curators from the British Library have selected maps, sounds, text and illustrations for ‘Alice’s Adventures Off the Map’!
Three themes have been chosen especially for the competition:
• Oxford
• Underground
• Gardens”
So yes, it’s based on the original text of Alice in Wonderland which is pretty interesting and exciting.
We were all assigned groups for this project, teams of six to be exact. After the initial brief outline given by Emma as a group we went into the labs and talked about ideas and what we should do for the project. Originally the project was set to be a 3d sidescroller game however due to complaints and conflicts of interest with students the tutors opened it up to be any type of game, open world, first person shooter for example. However we liked the idea of a 3d sidecroller so we stuck with our original plan and went with it.
“The main focus of this brief is to:
1. Make this journey interesting and rewarding for the player, through game play and navigation
2. Create a visually interesting environment that reflects the literary world of ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’.
3. Whilst you can look at modern adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, your designs should be firmly anchored in the original collections held at the British Library”
This project last 9 weeks so we are able to be adventurous however sensible because we are representing the university and it needs to be good and show those 3 aspects.
Week 19:
Brief introduced, team, roles and themes assigned.
Read “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. No seriously READ IT before you start!
Research, mood boards, asset lists
Plan journey & interactive elements
This is the project plan that the tutors have given us, it’s a rough vague idea of what we should be doing each week. This week we had to read the book of course, and do lots of research and start building up an idea of what we want the level to look and work like.
So we made a linear blockout of our level and then sectioned parts off so everyone had something to concept and work on.
As you can see I was assigned the first garden area and the rabbit hole to concept. First I did some research and read the book, especially focusing on the parts I was working on in the book and made a list of objects Alice sees as she falls down the rabbit hole so I could include them, I also made a load of moodboards.
After a review session with Chris and Steve on Friday we got some helpful feedback and decided to discuss the style guide and actually pick a style to work from so everything would be uniform and work together, as this is what Chris and Steve brought up when we showed them the concepts we had done so far.
When we had finished discussing it we had decided that we would go for stylised throughout the level as before we had decided on starting off realistic and then gradually becoming stylised and slightly trippy and weird. Chris and Steve brought up the fact that that idea would probably be very time consuming and hard to accomplish in the time limit as we want to really polish up the level and make it really awesome.
So we looked into stylised games and Imogen suggested “Puppeteer” which is an interesting looking game where you play as a wooden puppet. The puppet style made the characters to look quite low poly and blocky, which is something that interests the group as a whole. The colour palette of this game was also inspiring as it’s so colourful as uses almost opposite colours for the characters.
Week 19:
Brief introduced, team, roles and themes assigned.
Read “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. No seriously READ IT before you start!
Research, mood boards, asset lists
Plan journey & interactive elements
This is the project plan that the tutors have given us, it’s a rough vague idea of what we should be doing each week. This week we had to read the book of course, and do lots of research and start building up an idea of what we want the level to look and work like.
So we made a linear blockout of our level and then sectioned parts off so everyone had something to concept and work on.
As a group we had decided to keep as close to the project as possible. As it’s still early days I just drew up a very simple linear blockout on my part of the level.
After doing these concepts and seeing what the group had done I wanted to make the level more interactive so I decided on making a puzzle somewhere in the part I had concepted. I had an empty room down the rabbit hole so I made one in there.
When we had finished discussing it we had decided that we would go for stylised throughout the level as before we had decided on starting off realistic and then gradually becoming stylised and slightly trippy and weird. Chris and Steve brought up the fact that that idea would probably be very time consuming and hard to accomplish in the time limit as we want to really polish up the level and make it really awesome.
So we looked into stylised games and Imogen suggested “Puppeteer” which is an interesting looking game where you play as a wooden puppet. The puppet style made the characters to look quite low poly and blocky, which is something that interests the group as a whole. The colour palette of this game was also inspiring as it’s so colourful as uses almost opposite colours for the characters.
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| Puppeteer environments moodboard |
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| Puppeteer color palette |
So the plan for now is to carry on with concepts and building up the stylised idea and making it work.
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