Alice's adventures off the map!

Hello everyone! The competition I have been waiting for a year has begun! Gamecity and the British Library have set in motion the 3rd Off the map competition. Using the 125th anniversary of the original Alice in wonderland, they've come up with an awesome competition for this year!

Our university has gained a lot of popularity thanks to this competition and we have high standards they expect from us. Pudding Lane productions did a fantastic job at recreating London during the period of the great fire but we are determined to do better than them!

The competition is made of three themes:

Oxford
Gardens
Underground

At first we were told to come up with a side scroller game and I kind of liked the idea, but in the end the tutors let us do what we thought more suitable for this project.

Our first thoughts were to do a stylized game with textures similar to Victorian illustrations. In the end we decided to go for a more realistic approach. We wanted something that would appeal to everybody, we wanted to create a game but also a learning experience.

In the end we decided to recreate Oxford during the Victorian era and link it to Lewis Carroll's owns views of the city. We would include specific areas where Carroll took inspiration for his famous Alice and wonderland books.

The idea is simple, you explore Oxford looking for clues (book pages) and learn about the book and how it related to real life. The level repeats itself, in other words, once you get to the end point you get teleported back to the beginning. The difference though is that the environment is changed. The weather changes, the buildings change and the experience is different. Our goal is that as the player collects the pages of the book it gradually gets teleported into the actual Alice in wonderland world.

This is the basic layout of our level.

As well as collecting the pages, we plan on adding more interactions to make the overall gameplay a lot more interesting.

I was appointed character artist for this project and my job at the moment is to concept model and animate a white rabbit which will guide the player through the level.

I first started with a couple of studies of rabbits and then I created my own rabbit running pictures. I found the first row on the internet, I took it and then created the skeletal form inside it to help me visualize the movement when it comes to animating.

Since as you go through the level, everything looks more like in the books, the rabbit will change as well...

I used various references of Victorian clothing to come up with the designs for the white rabbit and then merged the best ones into one final one.

Colouring was fun. I wanted to use bold and contrasting colors so that it would look a bit surreal. In the end the green suit seemed to be the one which stood out for most people so I decided to base my final concept on that color combination.

And here's my version of the white rabbit. I think the pink eyes make him look a bit evil but I made his face and overall shape kind of round to imply that he is a good guy.

And..this is it for today. Next post I'll talk about our group trip to Oxford and Cheshire cat concepts!

See you soon!


P.S. Jonah has been very nice to set up a group blog called The flaming dodo where we all post our progress and developments on the project.

flaming dodo productions (Link)