“I couldn't get away from pen and ink,” says John Evelyn, creator of The collage atlas, a dream story adventure recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand-drawn, from small flowers and insects to huge buildings and the clouds that float above them. Exploring this world reveals its dreamlike story, with environments that unfold in response to your focus.
“I had drawn for many years before (…) and I always drew with ink immediately, without any prior work with pencil or sketch,” he says. “I liked all the incidental details and accidents that happen along the way.” She compares it to improvisational music: “In fact, sometimes it goes terribly wrong!” – But he says that the feeling of moving forward and being surprised by unexpected results was important for the entire game.
This is why the art style underpins the rest of the experience. Where individual pieces of game art can take a backseat, The collage atlas Solicits your attention to detail and reward. At the beginning of the game, a pinwheel appears on a grassy plain; Look at it and start spinning. It was one of the first things Evelyn created, for what was originally an app meant to accompany an illustrated book.
The book, a continuation of a self-published work called Asleep like the breeze, aimed to explore themes of agency and the feeling of disempowerment that can arise from traumatic or chaotic life experiences. “You may begin to feel like life is something that happens to you rather than something you have significant control or ownership over,” says Evelyn.
While experimenting with that theme, “everything fell into place” when the pinwheel turned, he says. “It suddenly made sense that this was actually the crux of what I was trying to talk about. That, in reality, even when it doesn't seem like it, just his presence in the world is genuinely meaningful and really has an impact on him. Even your gaze and your observation are also significant.”
“Even your gaze and your observation are also significant.”
Evelyn based the app idea on a short art experience, which she exhibited in the Leftfield Collection at the UK EGX gaming convention in 2016. At the time, she says, she had no intention of continuing to expand it into a game which would eventually make Apple Arcade and then Steam. Instead, she says, it was “something that I personally felt I really needed to do.”
“I had been going through a pretty bad run of years,” he says, “and I was having a hard time finding media that spoke to me about the things I was experiencing.” Other mediums seemed deeply specific to others' situations, while Evelyn wanted something broader. “Things that just address universal themes I find really useful.”
At the fair, people connected with his piece. In particular, Evelyn was drawn to the attention of “business-type people” who asked her how long the full game would last. “In my mind, I thought, 'Oh, do you really think people would want that?'” She says she went along with them because, if they approached it from a “pretty cold financial point of view” and thought there, If there was an audience for it, he might believe it himself.
Image: John William Evelyn
I knew I wanted the experience to be something that could “sink you in slowly,” meaning a couple of hours, rather than 10 minutes. Over the next four years, she did everything she could to complete that outreach. Although she had experience and knowledge from a career that included time creating Flash games, working in freelance illustration, and releasing music EPs, she also had a lot to learn. “The day I started The collage atlas as it is now, not the little demo version, that was the first day I opened Unity (the game engine),” he says.
To convert illustrations to 3D, a process he had never done before, he began by creating the models in Unity before printing his maps and drawing the details with a pen. Once scanned again, those textures were added back to the model to create the world of The collage atlas and everything that makes it up.
“The works do not have any type of permanence, they can simply disappear.”
After almost five years of work, in 2020 the game was released on Apple Arcade, but in 2023 it was delisted when the exclusivity period ended. Not long after, even the people who had downloaded it couldn't start it. “This is the sad thing about the way our creative media develops: works have no permanence; they can simply disappear,” he says. Evelyn felt like she owed it to her past self, who did all that work to make sure the game was still available and recently released it on Steam.
After the game's release on Apple Arcade, Evelyn thought that maybe she was done working on the games. “I talked to one of my friends who is an AAA developer and I said, 'That's it. I already finished that one. I'll never do this again.' He said, 'I'll give you six months.'” Almost exactly six months later, she began working on her next game. The wings of the sycamore. Also drawn by hand, it is a kind of spiritual sequel to The collage atlas.
“Atlas it’s trying to explore the idea of falling inward,” he says. “sycamore wings It's about flying. After you get out of the depths, hopefully, that's when you have the pure joy of flying.”
