Week 19, Year 2: Adventures!

This is it. The monster project in the final stretch of my second year at university, is GameCity's, Alice's Adventures Off the Map competition. For the next few months, we are working in teams of 6, to create a game or level, based on Alice's Adventures Underground. My team is called Flaming Dodo Productions and we have our own site where you can follow our progress.

To kick things off, I read the book, as I hadn't read it before. While I enjoyed my afternoon reading, it didn't spark any particularly enticing ideas. We decided from the start that we did not want to create an 'Alice in Wonderland game', so I began to look elsewhere.

In my search for inspiration, I decided to play a couple of games; Never Alone and Dear Esther. While Never Alone completely blew me away, the primary source of inspiration for this project came from Dear Esther.

Containers are everywhere!

Dear Esther is simple and short, yet very engaging. The game is set on a beautiful and serene island, which has an almost eery sense of stillness. While there is a narrator, the majority of the storytelling comes from the environment itself, and that is what I'd like to achieve with this project. An environment that tells the story, of how the idea for Alice's Wonderland crystalized in the mind of Lewis Carroll.

So we had an idea, but to really get things going, we felt we needed to actually go there. So I hired a car and planned a road trip to Oxford.

Christ Church, Oxford.

We were told that we absolutely could not miss the Pitt Rivers museum, so we headed there first and we were not disappointed. It was totally awe inspiring and we all had a fantastic few hours exploring the hundreds of cabinets, containing everything from machine guns to shrunken heads.

A few hours wasn't nearly enough. I'm planning to return though, armed with my Nomad (when it finally arrives) to get a good few days sketching in.

 

But it wasn't all fun and shrunken heads, we did do some work. After lunch, we went and visited Christ Church, where Lewis Carroll worked at the time of writing Alice's Adventures Underground.

Visiting the college, the cathedral and the surrounding area really helped give us a sense of the environment that we are basing our level on and we were able to shoot plenty of reference. It's difficult to know how a place feels without actually going there, particularly when trying to get a sense of scale. After walking the grounds and exploring the area, the British Library images that we have been provided became so much more relatable, which will hopefully really help inform our project.

It was an extremely tiring day, I'm not used to 6AM starts, but it was very enjoyable and a great use of our time. We visited a couple of museums, explored a good deal of Oxford and all in all, it was a successful field trip for team Flaming Dodo!

Dodo in Oxford's, Museum of Natural History.