Alice’s Adventures off the Map

After the months preparing us for the trials, tribulations and benefits of group work it’s finally time for the Off the Map project and this year we’re working to create something to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of ‘Alice’s adventures underground’ by Lewis Carroll, choosing from three categories of either Underground, Oxford or Gardens.  

It's the third year of the British Library competition and DMU seem very keen as win or place as runners up as I'm sure we all are considering years later anything to do with Off the Map still brings searches to DMU's first winners, Pudding Lane productions. So the hope is to do well, put our skills so far to the test and hopefully get some good work out there. 

Everyone was allocated a team in an attempt to see that every team had a member that wanted to cover a certain area of the design process, so concepting, environment art, engine work ect.
Of the group I was placed in I'd only worked with one of them before but I'd seen the quality of work the others had produced in the past and while skilled teammates is a very good thing, it can be pretty intimidating so it's going to be a lot of energy to get myself to stay confident.  
As for the project itself, it was originally introduced as a sidescroller so we began our researching into that until we received an email to tell us the sidescroller was no longer mandatory at which point the team decided they would prefer a first person game and focus switched to that.

For this, the general idea is exploration with puzzles and mini games. One of the team has experience with Source code and is really good at working with the engine Blueprints so even though I had wanted to do some work with the engine myself there's pretty much nothing in my skill set that he probably doesn't already know, on the plus side I get to see some fairly complex Blueprints and how they work.
So for the first day we set about basic research and idea generation, we vocalised some ideas before going away as individuals to sketch some of our own plans to come back and compare. From what the others had said I thought it would be good to start on an area of higher elevation as it would allow us to give the player a direct line of sight over to the end of the map with their final goal and it would then let the player look down on the path they would be travelling.

Since our designs also have to grounded in the book, 'grounded' probably being the wrong word for anything related to Alice in Wonderland, everybody also had to have read the text. This led to a very odd day of relative silence in the labs as the majority of Game art students sat down and read a book. This also led to me finding what is possibly one of my favorite illustrations in the world with one of most displeased expressions I have ever come across.

By the end of the second day we seemed to have had our basic layout completed, it could probably have used more iterations but it did fit into what we needed and we could always make changes if need be. So from the map sketch I generated a quick version in Photoshop to get the key areas and landmarks that needed concepting down. While our concept artists started work on the major areas other person started on a whitebox in Unreal 4 so we could get a feel for scale and look as well as having something more accurate to work from for future concepts.

Meanwhile since the category we had selected was 'Gardens' I started on blocking out some modular pieces for hedgerows, to create a set of assets that we could clip together to create garden layouts.

So this week we've started settling down into the project and we seem to have a good foundation for the coming weeks and I look forward to seeing how it goes.