08 - Lego Project (Alice In Wonderland) Summary

08 - Lego Project (Alice In Wonderland)

For our final year 1 assignment, we were asked to go into groups of six and create a Lego presentation for Arthur Parsons who is Head of Design at TT Games. We were given four different themes to choose from. Our group decided to go ahead with "Alice In Wonderland". The presentation needed to be no longer than 5 minutes and we had to talk about the story of the level, the character mechanics and the overall overview of the level itself. Here is the top down view version of level design I created in Photoshop:

When thinking of different levels to do for Alice In Wonderland, instead of thinking of one idea and doing that one straight away. I thought of another two scenes we could have done such as the “Potion Making scene” & the “Defeating the Jabberwocky scene”. When showing this the group, we all decided it would be best to do the “Mad Hatter’s Town scene”. As we thought it was a cool concept to bring a scene which is only in the film for a good twenty seconds and bring all of that into life. 

Sam came up with the scene and I wrote the level story for it. When doing the “level write up” Sam came up with the three puzzles, three links and boss fight and had a summary of features / mechanics we wanted in the game. I then showed him my version and we brought the two together on an online word document and merged them together creating the final level write up. 

When doing the level design sketch, I originally sketched up my piece below and added Sam to my Microsoft Whiteboard so he could sketch one himself and we could alter anything that needed adjusting / changing. Once we had the two side by side we amended / changed anything we didn’t like together. Me and Sam spent a lot of time on discord altering and changing things together in-real time on both Microsoft whiteboard and the online word document as it increased the workflow dramatically and made the whole process run smoothly. 

I did the finalized level design in Photoshop to show a top down view of what the level would look like and all the icons in the key too. I created the little icons to bring the level design to life and have more character to it as it relates to the items in the level. Once I finalized that, myself and Sam checked it and made any amendments that needing doing. After that Sam brought it to life in Unreal Engine 4. 

Once we had everything done to the standard we wanted, we all worked on the Presentation together (online again to edit things in real-time) so we could easily adjust anything with ease. We decided to do a group presentation and talk about the things we did to participate to the project, as it’s much easier to talk about the work you have done, as you have done it and you can talk about the thought process and why we did things a certain way. 

I worked heavily on level design & character mechanics. However, I feel like we worked well as a team and even though we had our officially roles, we all still helped one another even if it wasn’t a part of our “role”. I’ve talked about me and Sam collaborating with one another. Will and Luke have done the same by Luke drawing a lot of the concept art and then Will applying these as textures to his 3d models he has created. I had zero input in any of the art designs (other than my icons in Photoshop), but I just wanted to mention how great the concept arts and 3d models are and how they both worked together to create these masterpieces. Andy created a lot of great props to showcase which items the player would see in the level and again, Andy worked closely with Will whilst approaching this. 

Lastly, for the practising of the presentation we all got together on discord and set a timer to rehearse our presentation repeatedly to see what we need to work on and to build our confidence together. It was a great team to be a part of and before distributing the roles, I made it extremely clear that I don’t want anyone doing something they don’t want to do, as I want everyone to work happy whilst working on this project. I also mentioned that if I come up with an idea that isn’t great. That they should tell me and be honest about what they thought, as I wouldn’t get offended or feel threatened by people’s opinions, as I want the best for our project but not only that. I want everyone to feel comfortable and have a good atmosphere whilst working together in this team, which made the whole experience extremely enjoyable.