Off the Map Begins

This brief we enter the Off the Map competition, and this year’s theme is Alice in Wonderland. We started as a team of 6, but then dropped down to 5 in the first day, this puts us at a slight disadvantage to the rest of the course but it shouldn’t affect us too much. The first day we all threw some ideas around that we had and stuck it all on a board.

We decided to go for a sidescroller game which was first compulsory, and then not, but we had settled on a sidescroller before that change was made so we stuck with it. We all read the book the Monday night and Came back on the Tuesday. Again we threw some ideas around and I tried to illustrate my idea for the Cheshire Cat in a drawing, and it was a terrible drawing but it was technically our first piece of concept art, so we made it our team logo. And our name is from the film where the Mad Hatter declares a pocket watch “Two days slow”

We were allocating roles to each other, I was assigned environment artist and engine guy. I shared the engine role with another team mate so that we weren’t just doing mind numbing engine work for 12 weeks straight. Doing exclusively engine work seemed to diminish a person’s sanity after a whole brief in the past, so we shared it.

We decided on what parts of the story we wanted to do, and that was most of it, we think we can do it by abbreviating some sections so hopefully we can cram it all in.

I created a simple blockout in 3ds Max, Lewis then made a radical one which me realise how boring mine was. So I took inspiration from Lewis’ and made some iterations to find a medium point between the two ideas.

I then began playing with some engine stuff on growing and shrinking mechanics we plan to have in the game, not much to show now but it should be finished by next week.