In Pictures – Doctor Who: The Adventure Games

The BBC has this morning lifted the lid on an in-depth games collaboration with UK studio Sumo Digital and adventure games auteur Charles Cecil.

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games is a brand new, episodic PC/Mac title that will be available for free.

The game is built using Sumo’s proprietary engine, Immersion, and each episode is designed to be a download of around 250MB each.

Here, we provide an extensive gallery of the game’s artwork – from initial key concept artwork (some of which appear to have been composed as far back as before the ‘look’ of Matt Smith’s new Doctor was decided) through to screen shots from the first episode.

Keep checking Develop over the next five days for extensive behind-the-scenes coverage of the new Doctor Who game, including Q&As with the show’s writers and exec producers, the man at BBC Vision who masterminded the project, and our talk with the design team.

BACKGROUND

So, for those that don’t know, here’s what the Doctor and his new companion Amy look like in the show…

And here’s how they look in game…

CONCEPT ARTWORK

The four episodes of Doctor Who: The Adventure Games take players to a variety of locations – both on Earth and off it, some above ground some far below the sea. And they include a mix of classic villains from the TV shows.

Charles Cecil and the team at Sumo Digital have been given free reign to come up with some of the most ambitious Doctor Who stories ever told visually that can be played whenever viewers want – all under the watch of the team who make the Saturday night shows.

"We can do things in those [game] episodes that we can’t do in the TV show," says series producer Piers Wenger.

"We long to go to alien planets and to blow up the centre of London and go on the Underground in a post-apocalyptic world, but we can’t do them on TV sometimes."

"Or if we do we’d need to have five cheap episodes after to make up for it," jokes lead writer Steven Moffat.

SCREENSHOTS

Cecil told Develop he wants to strike a balance between accessibility and challenge as the games will be targeted at the show’s incredibly diverse audience.

He said: “Generally the gameplay is driven by stealth, minigames and a little bit of object interaction. But it’s not an adventure in that you are scratching your head trying to work out how to use two abstract objects together."

Shown here is a sequence from one puzzle shown during the opening of the very first episode.

And here are some shots from the second episode, which
sees you encounter some classic villains in sub-zero environments…

And that’s your lot.

Keep checking Develop over the next five days for extensive behind-the-scenes coverage of the new Doctor Who game, including Q&As with the show’s writers and exec producers, the man at BBC Vision who masterminded the project, and our talk with the design team.