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, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook adventure recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand drawn, from tiny flowers and insects to huge buildings and the clouds that float over them. Exploring this world unwraps its dreamlike story, with environments folding out in response to your approach.

“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 music — “actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” — but says that the feeling of getting into a stride and being surprised by unexpected outcomes was important to the whole game.

It’s because of this that the art style underpins the rest of the experience. Where individual pieces of game art can fall into the background, The Collage Atlas requests your attention to detail — and rewards it. At the very start of the game, a pinwheel appears from a grassy plain; look at it, and it begins spinning. It was one of the first things that Evelyn created, for what was originally an app meant to accompany a picture book.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“I couldn’t walk away from the pen and ink thing,” says John Evelyn, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook adventure recently released on Steam.

“I liked all the incidental details and the accidents that come out along the way.” He compares it to improv music — “actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” — but says that the feeling of getting into a stride and being surprised by unexpected outcomes was important to the whole game.

The book, a follow-up to a self-published work called Asleep As The Breeze, was intended to explore themes of agency and the feeling of disempowerment that can come from traumatic or chaotic life experiences.

Evelyn built on the app idea for a short art experience, which he exhibited at the Leftfield Collection at UK gaming convention EGX in 2016.

Although he had experience and knowledge from a career that included time making Flash games, working in freelance illustration, and releasing music EPs, he also had a lot to learn.

In order to convert illustrations to 3D, a process he had never done before, he began by creating the models in Unity before printing their maps and drawing in the details with pen.

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