DMUGA Week 19 - Off the Map Project: Alice in Wonderland!

I am very excited to get under-way with our new project/competition entry. Each year, 'GameCity' hosts a competition in collaboration with the British Library whereby artists & designers put their minds together to create interactive digital media - This time you can submit anything from 2D, 3D, or Interactive Text.

The brief:

-Choose 'OXFORD', 'UNDERGROUND', or 'GARDENS' as a priority section to base your idea on.

-Resource material is supplied, e.g. Sounds, Maps, Information/Text.

-Anchor your work in the BL collections

For more information, please see the website!:

Off The Map Competition 2015 - Alice's Adventures

First things first... groups! We were automatically assigned our groups based on what we what to specialise in, keeping a nice, even balance of skills within the team, each with prioritised job roles.

Our group consists of: Anya, Rebecca, Sharn, Denise, Dominic, and me - So, 6 minds, 1 task, 9 weeks... Let's do this!

We immediately began discussing general group rules about coming in each day, naming conventions etc, and then got down to business in terms of what exactly it is we feel is the best way to go for this project.

It came down between 'Underground' or 'Gardens' as no-one really was feeling the 'Oxford' category since there wasn't really anything about it in the book. In the end, we chose to do 'Gardens' because we felt that it would be the best option to do something visually more compelling than the 'Underground' category. Of course it is down to us in how we approach it, but the gardens just seemed the way to go!

We began putting together some ideas, moodboards, and looking into what style we wanted to go for, and came together in the afternoon to discuss how we were going to progress.

Here's my quick moodboards:

During the afternoon, we discussed what we wanted; 3D immersion, or a side scroller? After some debate on the pros & cons of both, we settled on a 1st person 3D adventure mainly for the immersion factor, and it meant not restricting the player to mainly 2 axis - they can explore wherever they want.

Before carrying on with ideas however, we all had to be sure that everyone was on the same page and that we'd all read the original text. Therefore, we agreed to spend the rest of the day doing that and coming up with ideas for what to include.

Original text of Alice Adventures in Wonderland, By Lewis Carroll

Wednesday morning when we had all arrived, we produced a quick plan of a level and asked each other what we may want to have in this 'journey' for the player. I white-boxed the level completely in Unreal Engine 4 so we could quickly decide whether or not what we had is any good. It just so happens that we quite liked what we had, so over the course of the week, we've been coming up with ideas on how to fill it.

1st Whitebox in Unreal Engine:

I also learnt a lot in terms of some of the possibilities of blueprints in UE4, and about what certain things do within the editor from Dom - The master of blueprints! He quickly set up one of our much wanted game mechanics... The grow & shrink:

Before eating the cake, height is standard

After Eating the cake, the player shrinks

This was really good as it made me want to learn how to 'script' even more! I've personally been looking at as many blueprinting tutorials as I can since this day!

I also came up with some ideas & sketches which are ok:

On Thursday, I refined the white-box some more, re-sculpted the mountains as they were 'too 'mountainous', and attempted some sketchovers:

Please excuse the over-saturated blues in this image... It doesn't really look like that!

We also had our 1st meeting with the tutors to discuss how we're getting on, and our thoughts on the project and how we're conducting ourselves around the brief. Emma agreed to meet us Friday morning and see what we've done as it was mainly on the computer. 

During Friday, we reviewed the current map to try and iron out some of the creases in our plan e.g. what to fill certain areas with/how could it be improved, what features to include etc:

I also spent quite some time again with Dom, looking at blueprinting and how we was constructing one for a maze puzzle we want to include:

Including this as a mini-game puzzle, or even a main puzzle

A fairly good week overall, we're meeting Emma again on Monday morning, and the first thing I'm going to do is get the group together and definitively decide on game-play elements and finalising some kind of layout for the map, so I'm really looking forward the the 9 o' clock start to get underway! :)