Off The Map! I - Alice In Wonderland

So we have got the point on the course now where we are expected to be awesome and make awesome things, with that Off The Map comes around which is a competition held by the British Library and Gamecity that gives us a great opportunity to make some amazing group projects and this year the theme is Alice In Wonderland!

We we given three different areas to explore: Underground, Gardens, or Oxford and a selection of materials from the British Library that we can use as a base for concepting an environment. So our group got together and did some hardcore research.

We went through reading the original book by Lewis Carroll 'Alice's adventures in Underground' and looked into all the fascinating materials the British Library provided including photos of cornish mines taken by John Burrows in the late 19th century, as well as work by a scholar named Athanasius Kircher. From this we did some brainstorming of we liked and didn't like and narrowed down on something we wanted to do, with the underground area exciting us the most.

A brainstorm of some of our ideas

After sifting through a load of research material and images on pinterest we came to settle on a couple of ideas. We decided to focus on the weirdness of the rabbit hole portrayed in the book and create surreal, warped halls acting as some weird extension of Lewis Carroll's study. The whole map will be based around a very small section of the book where Alice is trying to unlock the door to the garden, this allows us to make a small but detailed area filled with loads of references to the source material.

It's early days at the moment but hopefully next week it will start coming together, one thing that we are having trouble deciding on is a proper style guide that we can follow so we have a solid art direction, so that is what we are working on next.


Next time expect a much more solid framework of our idea and a lot more puzzle mechanics and art direction things.

-James