The five-year journey to make an adventure game out of ink and paper

“I couldn’t walk away from the pen and ink thing,” says John Evelyn, author of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook journey lately discharged on Steam. All the sport is hand drawn, from little flora and bugs to plethora structures and the clouds that go with the flow over them. Exploring this international unwraps its dreamlike tale, with environments folding out in keeping with your method.

“I had been drawing for many years before that […] and I’d always draw with ink straight away, without any kind of prior pencil work or sketching,” he says. “I liked all the incidental details and the accidents that come out along the way.” He compares it to improv song — “actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” — however says that the sensation of having right into a stride and being stunned by means of surprising results was once impressive to the entire sport.

It’s as a result of this that the artwork taste underpins the remainder of the revel in. The place particular person items of sport artwork can fall into the background, The Collage Atlas requests your consideration to attribute — and rewards it. On the very get started of the sport, a pinwheel seems from a grassy unadorned; have a look at it, and it starts spinning. It was once probably the most first issues that Evelyn created, for what was once at the beginning an app supposed to accompany an image conserve.

The conserve, a follow-up to a self-published paintings referred to as Asleep As The Wind, was once supposed to discover issues of company and the sensation of disempowerment that may come from annoying or chaotic past stories. “You can start to feel like life is something that’s kind of happening to you rather than something that you have meaningful control or authorship of,” says Evelyn.

Hour experimenting with that theme, “everything clicked into place,” when the pinwheel spun, he says. “It suddenly made sense that, actually, this was the crux of what I was trying to talk about. That, actually, even when it doesn’t feel like it, just your presence within the world is genuinely meaningful and actually does have an impact on it. Even your gaze and your observation is also meaningful.”

Evelyn constructed at the app concept for a scale down artwork revel in, which he exhibited on the Leftfield Assortment at UK gaming conference EGX in 2016. On the occasion, he says, he had negative purpose of constant to increase it right into a sport that might ultimately create it to Apple Arcade and upcoming Steam. Rather, he says, it was once “something that I personally felt like I really needed to do.”

“I had gone through a pretty bad run of years,” he says, “and I was finding it difficult to find media that spoke to me about the things I was experiencing.” Alternative media gave the impression deeply particular to others’ statuses, while Evelyn sought after one thing broader. “Things that just nudge at universal themes I find really useful.”

On the display, nation hooked up together with his piece. Particularly, Evelyn was once swayed by means of the eye of “business-type people,” who would ask him how lengthy the whole sport would finally end up being. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Oh, do you actually think that people would want that?’” He says he was once swayed by means of them as a result of, in the event that they have been coming at it from a “fairly cold financial standpoint” and idea there could be an target audience for it, he may be able to consider it himself.

He knew that he sought after the revel in to be one thing that would “slowly absorb you” — which means a few hours, instead than 10 mins. For the after 4 years, he threw the whole thing at filling out that scope. Even if he had revel in and information from a profession that incorporated occasion making Flash video games, operating in freelance representation, and freeing song EPs, he additionally had a quantity to be informed. “The day that I started The Collage Atlas as it is now, not the little demo version, that was the very first day I opened up [game engine] Unity,” he says.

To deliver to transform illustrations to three-D, a procedure he had by no means executed prior to, he started by means of developing the fashions in Harmony prior to printing their maps and drawing in the main points with pen. As soon as scanned again in, the ones textures have been readded to the type to develop the sector of The Collage Atlas and the whole thing that makes it up.

Then just about 5 years of labor, in 2020, the sport was once discharged on Apple Arcade, however in 2023 it was once delisted when the exclusivity duration ended. Now not lengthy later on, even nation who had downloaded it weren’t ready to establishing it. “This is the sad thing about the way our kind of creative mediums are going: works don’t have any kind of permanence — they can just vanish,” he says. Evelyn felt he owed it to his occasion self who did all that paintings to create certain the sport was once nonetheless to be had and lately introduced it on Steam.

Then the sport’s Apple Arcade drop, Evelyn idea he may well be executed operating on video games. “I spoke to one of my friends who’s a AAA developer and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s me done. I’m never doing this again.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you six months.’” Virtually precisely six months nearest, he got to work on his after sport, The Wings of Sycamore. Additionally hand-drawn, it’s one thing of a non secular sequel to The Collage Atlas.

“Atlas is trying to explore the idea of falling inwards,” he says. “Wings of Sycamore is about flight. After you manage to climb back out of the depths, hopefully, that’s when you just have the pure joy of flying.”