‘Alice in Wonderland’ Celebrates 155-Year Anniversary: Creators of ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ Share Unreleased Artwork
Hello, my name is Armando Abrahamsson, Marketing Lead at Cortopia Studios. Today marks 155 years since Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published. To celebrate, we’re excited to share some of the unpublished artwork from our VR puzzle and adventure game Down the Rabbit Hole. We hope you enjoy the illustrations and sketches, where we take you through the various stages of our creative process. And as a bonus, we’re offering a 30% discount on both the Oculus Quest and Rift Platforms, now through 8:59 pm PT on November 29.
At first, we had no clue where to start. We knew we wanted to build an experience where we could wrap the game around the player with varying rooms and environments. We knew we wanted to build something that resembled a more classical adventure. Lastly, we wanted the protagonist to be female. Early in our exploration, we asked our artists to create the style and elements we knew we wanted to include in the game.
Next, we began developing a basic storyboard to flesh out a storyline we could work around. The working title was The Pit. Obviously, if you’ve played Down the Rabbit Hole, you can already begin to see a bit of resemblance, but also how far we still were from the game we shipped. The Pit storyboard shows how we wanted the player to interact with the game to proceed to various levels and the “mood” we wished to convey.
With a barebones game style and mood in place, we began working on the protagonist. These sketches show Alexander’s first attempts at drafting our hero. Apart from being female, the protagonist was far from set in stone. The sketches show the various iterations Alexander created, taking his favorite part from each version on to the next.
The working name of the protagonist “The Girl” stuck, and we decided to use it. However, the character is not an isolated element of the game, and so she was also influenced by how we shaped the environments and levels. As Alexander generated multiple versions of the protagonist, Therése and Max worked on environments and levels.
Our artists were told to illustrate each level without feeling constrained by technical limitations. If any should arise, the team would decide to embrace them and find ways to make it work.
Early doodles playing with the styles and mood we had in mind.
Early color and depth explorations were used to find the best colors to communicate the mood of the environments. This greatly influences how the player feels when playing the game, so it was important to get it right.
After months of exploration, the environments begin taking shape as we start to get a sense of which sketches and biomes we wish to use. The attic and forest illustrations show what a relatively polished environment concept looked like.
Towards the end of the exploratory stage, when we already decided on the IP, Max was experimenting with varying the light in the attic level to reflect the different times of day. We liked it so much that we decided to use it as a model for some of the other levels and rooms.
The more environments we created, the more it began to look like a collection of various little wonderlands. Not long after, we began nicknaming the environment Wonderland. It was also at this stage we realized that The Pit was more resembling a hole, and to get to Wonderland you had to jump down the rabbit hole—get it?
After deciding to work with the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland IP, we had to make sure we were being respectful of Lewis Carroll’s creation. To do that, we looked at hundreds of illustrations and interpretations of the iconic work to see which characters and elements best represented the original IP. Still, we had to create a unique storyline, and so we created an alternative story where our protagonist is not Alice. This gave “The Girl” her own story but still allowed her to interact with known characters from Wonderland.
As we continued to create levels and improve character designs, they began to give a more representative appearance of how Down the Rabbit Hole ended up looking.
Having models like the attic made it easier to create levels like “The Duchess House,” which uses similar lines and colors.
There is so much more we could share about creating Down the Rabbit Hole—how we created the clever puzzles, the alternative endings, the music, and much more. We will be posting more of the unpublished illustrations in the Oculus Store and on our Facebook and Twitter pages, so head over there to see more.
If you want to try this adventure puzzle game for yourself or stay up to date with our developer posts, then wishlist Down the Rabbit Hole on the Quest and Rift Platforms!
