COLLAGE ATLAS
Penmanship counts
The Collage Atlas is a game I tend to think of more as a digital papercraft theateR. Cut-outs of bushes and lampposts—each drawn in black ink using 0.03mm fineliner pens—emerge from the rough white watercolor paper ground. Arranged in layers around a central gap, these create a garden walkway, leading towards an intricate, wrought iron-style pen-and-paper gazebo. “I draw everything on paper then scan each element,” explains the game’s creator, John Evelyn. He then cuts them out in Photoshop and removes the paper texture. “I take the bare line art and back it with a high res photo of a blank sheet of my paper.”
3D elements work more like paper construction projects. “I print the flat UV map outlines (like flattening the foil wrap off a chocolate Santa), then I draw all the detail in, scan that back into the computer, and wrap the model in the new hand-drawn texture.”
As well as trees, pinwheels and boats, The Collage Atlas uses text as a physical object in the game. For example, sometimes letters appear jumbled unless you stand at the exact right viewpoint. Physical text has been integral to the game since Evelyn decided it should be a game in a 3D space and not a picture book, as was the initial idea.
“It just made sense for the text to live within that space, too—rather than as an overlay. Before long I realized that if the text were to share the space with the player then it logically follows that it responds to, and acknowledges, the player much as the environment does.”
Agency and hope are key themes for Evelyn in this project. In pursuing those themes, The Collage Atlas is overtly reactive in ways developers usually try to hide. For example, assets rotate to face you as you move around, or move only when you look at them.
“Initially people find it strange that the game world essentially doesn’t exist until they act, until they breathe life into it,” says Evelyn. “But I’ve endeavored to pack the game with regular payoffs, to encourage people on their way and make that seem like a less daunting task.”
Drawing is a liberating experience for the self-taught Evelyn. “I tend to think exhaustively about everything, but when I draw, I don’t. I just let it turn out how it will,” he explains. “The more you learn, the less you realize you know, so I love keeping drawing as my one deliberately naive endeavor, it’s fun to do something entirely free from expectation.”