“I couldn't give up pen and ink,” says John Evelyn, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook 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 approach.
“Before that, I had been drawing for many years (…) and I always drew in ink from the start, without any prior work in pencil or sketches,” he says. “I loved all the serendipitous details and accidents that happen along the way.” He compares it to improvisational music: “Actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” ” – but said the feeling of moving forward and being surprised by unexpected results was important to the whole game.
This is why the art style underpins the rest of the experience. Where individual elements of the game's art may fade into the background, The Collage Atlas demands your attention to detail – and the reward. At the very beginning of the game, a pinwheel appears from a grassy plain; look at it, and it starts to spin. It was one of the first things Evelyn created, for what was originally an app to accompany a picture book.
The book, which follows a self-published work titled Asleep like the breeze, aimed to explore themes of agency and feelings of helplessness that can arise from traumatic or chaotic life experiences. “You may start to feel like life is something that happens to you rather than something you have significant control over or are the author of,” says Evelyn.
While experimenting with this theme, “everything fell into place” when the pinwheel spun, he says. “It suddenly made sense to me that, in fact, that was the gist of what I was trying to talk about. In fact, even if it doesn't feel like it, your mere presence in the world is truly meaningful and has a real impact on it. Even your gaze and observation also have meaning.
“Even your gaze and observation also have meaning.”
Evelyn built on the idea for the app for a short art experiment, which he exhibited at the Leftfield Collection at the UK gaming convention EGX in 2016. At the time, he says, he didn't had no intention of continuing to expand it into a game that would eventually make it to Apple Arcade and then Steam. Instead, he says, it was “something that I personally felt I really needed to do.”
“I had gone through some pretty difficult years,” he said, “and I had difficulty finding media that spoke to me about what I was going through. » Other media seemed deeply specific to other people's situations, while Evelyn wanted something broader. “Things that just push universal themes that I find really useful. »
During the show, people connected with his piece. In particular, Evelyn was influenced by attention from “business people”, who asked how long the full game would last. “In my mind I was like, 'Oh, do you really think people would want that?' » » He says he was influenced by them because, if they approached the issue from a “fairly cold financial point of view” and thought about it, would there be an audience for it, he might believe it himself -even.
Image: John William Evelyn
He knew he wanted the experience to be something that could “slowly absorb you” – meaning a few hours instead of 10 minutes. Over the next four years, he did everything he could to fulfill this mission. Although he gained the experience and knowledge from a career that included creating Flash games, freelance illustration work, and releasing music EPs, he also had a lot to learn. “The day I started The Collage Atlas as it is now, not the little demo version, it was the very first day I opened (the game engine) Unity,” he says.
To convert illustrations to 3D, a process he had never done before, he started by creating the models in Unity before printing their maps and drawing the details in pen. Once digitized, these textures were added to the model to create the world of The Collage Atlas and everything that makes it up.
“The works don’t have any sort of permanence, they can just disappear.”
After almost five years of work, in 2020 the game was released on Apple Arcade, but in 2023 it was delisted at the end of the exclusivity period. Soon after, even people who downloaded it were unable to launch it. “That's the sad thing about the evolution of our modes of creation: works don't have any sort of permanence – they can just disappear,” he says. Evelyn felt he owed it to his past who had done all this work to make sure the game was still available and had recently launched it on Steam.
After the game was released on Apple Arcade, Evelyn thought he might be done working on games. “I talked to a friend of mine who's a AAA developer and I said, 'That's it. I'm the one who finished. I will never do that again. He said, “I’ll give you six months.” » Almost exactly six months later, he began work on his next game, The wings of the sycamore. Also hand-drawn, it's something of a spiritual sequel to The Collage Atlas.
“Atlas tries to explore the idea of turning inward,” he says. “Sycamore Wings it's a question of theft. Once you have successfully climbed back out of the depths, I hope you will then experience the pure pleasure of flying.
