Alice in Wonderland Post Mortem
Michael Ollerton
We have just finished and have handed in our final project from this year. The Off The Map project. The brief was to design and create a playable level or game set in the alice in wonderland universe using the resources provided by the British library.
Our team consisted of Myself, Joel, Max, Lewis and Josh. Firstly i should mention that josh left our group in the first week to work alone, but then rejoined. We also had beth but she left during the project so none of her assets were used. Before we started the project we wrote down and made it clear what parts of the project we wanted to do. I was the main character artist for this project, Lewis was the main concept artist, Joel was one of the environment artist as well as engine and max was environment and engine. We also later had Josh join who help create environment assets. My contribution was The body of Alice, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, as well as the whole mushroom section, and a few miscellaneous assets.
So lets look at the project. We decided to make a sidescroller which retold the major points from the book with occasional puzzle. This Project for me started really well. I feel we began with an awesome group of people and i was very optimistic. Our first week was ideas and research. I think we approached the project very professionally before we started coming up with any ideas, we all went away a read the first book of alice in wonderland, even if we had read it before, so that memory hadn't change how we thought the story went. Due to this being a competition i believe we started with the hope of winning so we wanted to go big. We knew it was going to be a lot of hard work, but we wanted to tell the complete story of alice in wonderland. We thought this would put us above a lot of competition as its something that would work really well with the anniversary of the book, making the complete story accessible in this manner. It was made very clear from our tutors that if we want to pull this off we would have to work really hard and that we should begin making assets very soon, in the second week to be exact.
As the Project progressed a few weeks i feel the concepting stage was going really well. Lewis was the main concept artist in this project of course but being able to iterate on his ideas and then send them back to him which he would then iterate on again. From this work flow i think we came up with some really awesome characters. We originally had a very long list of characters that we wanted to include, i think because i had just read the book i had already chosen a few favourites, such as the mock turtle, unfortunately we had to cut almost all of them. The characters we choose to keep were Alice, Caterpillar, Cat and the mad hatter. While lewis and myself were concepting in this way Joel began to make blockouts of our whole level, Joel also created most of the technical blueprints for our level, from dialog to puzzles. I didn't do as much concept as i would have like to for this project as i moved on making alice very early on, but i tried to help out the group with paint overs when i felt an idea could be pushed more.
One thing that was very important to us was the involvement of John Tenniel's illustrations. I still think its incredible how timeless those drawings are. In our level you progress from the illustrated world into the colourful 3d world. Max took the helm for the illustrated section producing all the hand drawn assets, environments and characters. Max was very fast at producing these assets so it made sense for him to make them all, as well as to avoid style changes between people's drawings.
We discussed the style we wanted for the game and a some of us were on the same page but i think a few people were confused later down the line. About half way through the project we sat down and wrote out an art guide which help out a lot. In future projects i will now know to spend some time making sure the art style is coherent very early on so that everyone in the group can follow it. Max created the style guide around the time that josh rejoined our group. Max did a great job with the style guide and pointed out things i wanted but that i didn't know how to put down in words. I feel the style guide really helped me. I think after we started getting assets from josh we realised he probably didn't read the guide which was annoying as we spent time on it.
The gameplay is very basic in our level, it is essentially a walk from A to B, we wanted this because it is meant to be very accessible to get the story. We decided early that we didn't want the player to die, so theres no failure to any of the puzzles, you just get a different result, which i think fits wonderland. This is of course a children's book so we designed it to be played by a young child. The only hard section is the key room puzzle and if this was the finished game for OTM it would have prompts if the player is taking too long.
I created the body of Alice, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, as well as the whole mushroom section, and a few miscellaneous asset which included some trees, logs, tree stump, Dodo feet, rocks and a this way/that way sign. As this project went on, i have got very proficient at using Zbrush, and my pipeline for creating organic assets is really easy for me now, i can knock something out i Zbrush then retopo it i 3dcoat and then unwrap it in max. This is how i made a lot of my assets near the end and with out working like this i wouldn't have nearly as many assets in the level.
We had a lot of unavoidable group issues this project, with Beth and Josh. We were all originally ok with josh leaving the group in the first week, because it was clear he had very different ideas to us. Beth began to stop showing up and communication with her seemed to stop completely. We spoke to our personal tutors about what we could do about this an eventually we got to talk with beth again, Beth had a lot of personal problems and which resulted in her leaving the group all together. (making us a 4 man team) We spent a lot of weeks worrying about beth when we should be worrying about the project and this hurt us a lot, to the point where the last two weeks left us with so much work still to do. Because of this like i said earlier i had to take on mushroom section. I really enjoyed making this section, even though i was expecting only to make characters this project by the end i really had to make a bit of everything. Because of these group issues though we had to drastically scale back our idea because it wasn't really possible any more, to make the whole story, which i am still a bit sad about, as we lost our major edge in the competition. Later josh rejoined are group which meant we were again a five man team, josh's job was to help take some of the load off are backs by creating assets we still needed. Josh was working well with us at first but again began to sit very far away from us, and stop communicating, and was just making any assets he felt like instead of needed. In the end on the very last day josh seemed to dump all his assets on Max to put in engine, when Max already had a lot of things to do that day. In the end I was just unlucky this time with my group, but i feel more prepare if similar issues happen in the future. Overall i am very thankful of Max and Joel being in my group as i think together we managed to steer a potential disaster into a really good project.
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i think our time management was the worst part of this project, we never made a schedule or timetable for us all to follow. This really affected us especially in the last few weeks of the project, myself and everyone else in the group still had a lot of stuff to make, and we were very lucky that we got finished in time (even though there were a few all nighters).
I am personally really happy with the assets i produce for this project, and i have grown really close to a lot of my group members. We made the best out of a pretty bad situation, and in the end create something i am really happy with. This is the last project this year and i think it could have gone better but i have learnt so much, and i am very ready to start some personal projects to further my self improvement. My action plan is to first do a project on materials, A game art graduate has said that my year is really good at the modelling stage but that we need to work on our materials. So that my plan for the first few weeks is work on nailing a load of materials similar to what the thirds year did in week 1. After that I'm going to produce a game character, and then a small environment. I also plan to hammer home the fundamentals covered in scott robertsons dvds.
Our team consisted of Myself, Joel, Max, Lewis and Josh. Firstly i should mention that josh left our group in the first week to work alone, but then rejoined. We also had beth but she left during the project so none of her assets were used. Before we started the project we wrote down and made it clear what parts of the project we wanted to do. I was the main character artist for this project, Lewis was the main concept artist, Joel was one of the environment artist as well as engine and max was environment and engine. We also later had Josh join who help create environment assets. My contribution was The body of Alice, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, as well as the whole mushroom section, and a few miscellaneous assets.
So lets look at the project. We decided to make a sidescroller which retold the major points from the book with occasional puzzle. This Project for me started really well. I feel we began with an awesome group of people and i was very optimistic. Our first week was ideas and research. I think we approached the project very professionally before we started coming up with any ideas, we all went away a read the first book of alice in wonderland, even if we had read it before, so that memory hadn't change how we thought the story went. Due to this being a competition i believe we started with the hope of winning so we wanted to go big. We knew it was going to be a lot of hard work, but we wanted to tell the complete story of alice in wonderland. We thought this would put us above a lot of competition as its something that would work really well with the anniversary of the book, making the complete story accessible in this manner. It was made very clear from our tutors that if we want to pull this off we would have to work really hard and that we should begin making assets very soon, in the second week to be exact.
As the Project progressed a few weeks i feel the concepting stage was going really well. Lewis was the main concept artist in this project of course but being able to iterate on his ideas and then send them back to him which he would then iterate on again. From this work flow i think we came up with some really awesome characters. We originally had a very long list of characters that we wanted to include, i think because i had just read the book i had already chosen a few favourites, such as the mock turtle, unfortunately we had to cut almost all of them. The characters we choose to keep were Alice, Caterpillar, Cat and the mad hatter. While lewis and myself were concepting in this way Joel began to make blockouts of our whole level, Joel also created most of the technical blueprints for our level, from dialog to puzzles. I didn't do as much concept as i would have like to for this project as i moved on making alice very early on, but i tried to help out the group with paint overs when i felt an idea could be pushed more.
One thing that was very important to us was the involvement of John Tenniel's illustrations. I still think its incredible how timeless those drawings are. In our level you progress from the illustrated world into the colourful 3d world. Max took the helm for the illustrated section producing all the hand drawn assets, environments and characters. Max was very fast at producing these assets so it made sense for him to make them all, as well as to avoid style changes between people's drawings.
We discussed the style we wanted for the game and a some of us were on the same page but i think a few people were confused later down the line. About half way through the project we sat down and wrote out an art guide which help out a lot. In future projects i will now know to spend some time making sure the art style is coherent very early on so that everyone in the group can follow it. Max created the style guide around the time that josh rejoined our group. Max did a great job with the style guide and pointed out things i wanted but that i didn't know how to put down in words. I feel the style guide really helped me. I think after we started getting assets from josh we realised he probably didn't read the guide which was annoying as we spent time on it.
The gameplay is very basic in our level, it is essentially a walk from A to B, we wanted this because it is meant to be very accessible to get the story. We decided early that we didn't want the player to die, so theres no failure to any of the puzzles, you just get a different result, which i think fits wonderland. This is of course a children's book so we designed it to be played by a young child. The only hard section is the key room puzzle and if this was the finished game for OTM it would have prompts if the player is taking too long.
I created the body of Alice, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, as well as the whole mushroom section, and a few miscellaneous asset which included some trees, logs, tree stump, Dodo feet, rocks and a this way/that way sign. As this project went on, i have got very proficient at using Zbrush, and my pipeline for creating organic assets is really easy for me now, i can knock something out i Zbrush then retopo it i 3dcoat and then unwrap it in max. This is how i made a lot of my assets near the end and with out working like this i wouldn't have nearly as many assets in the level.
We had a lot of unavoidable group issues this project, with Beth and Josh. We were all originally ok with josh leaving the group in the first week, because it was clear he had very different ideas to us. Beth began to stop showing up and communication with her seemed to stop completely. We spoke to our personal tutors about what we could do about this an eventually we got to talk with beth again, Beth had a lot of personal problems and which resulted in her leaving the group all together. (making us a 4 man team) We spent a lot of weeks worrying about beth when we should be worrying about the project and this hurt us a lot, to the point where the last two weeks left us with so much work still to do. Because of this like i said earlier i had to take on mushroom section. I really enjoyed making this section, even though i was expecting only to make characters this project by the end i really had to make a bit of everything. Because of these group issues though we had to drastically scale back our idea because it wasn't really possible any more, to make the whole story, which i am still a bit sad about, as we lost our major edge in the competition. Later josh rejoined are group which meant we were again a five man team, josh's job was to help take some of the load off are backs by creating assets we still needed. Josh was working well with us at first but again began to sit very far away from us, and stop communicating, and was just making any assets he felt like instead of needed. In the end on the very last day josh seemed to dump all his assets on Max to put in engine, when Max already had a lot of things to do that day. In the end I was just unlucky this time with my group, but i feel more prepare if similar issues happen in the future. Overall i am very thankful of Max and Joel being in my group as i think together we managed to steer a potential disaster into a really good project.
.png)
i think our time management was the worst part of this project, we never made a schedule or timetable for us all to follow. This really affected us especially in the last few weeks of the project, myself and everyone else in the group still had a lot of stuff to make, and we were very lucky that we got finished in time (even though there were a few all nighters).
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