Mighty Coconut will soon release an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland DLC course for Walkabout Mini Golf, and in this interview we speak with Don Carson to learn how the team translated Carroll’s surreal world into playful, navigable spaces for VR. Don Carson is the senior art director for Mighty Coconut, and has worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, art directing projects like Splash Mountain, Mickey’s Toontown and Blizzard Beach. His focus is bringing design principles unique to environmental storytelling to projects all over the world. Don has applied designs to computer games, the theatre and other media. He has a long career in theme park design, and strives to show the potential of using the principles of environmental storytelling to influence an audience’s experience, whether they are exploring a physical or virtual world. This conversation covers the course’s inspirations, John Tenniel’s influence, scenes that work particularly well in VR mini golf, the design challenges of making Wonderland playable, and how the studio balances nostalgia with a fresh Mighty Coconut spin.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted countless times across different media – what inspired Mighty Coconut’s take on this classic story, and how did you approach translating its surreal world into the Walkabout Mini Golf experience?
I have had a life long love of the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland book and although many have interpreted the story they often tend to take creative license with the scenes and characters, frequently mixing in the Through the Look Glass moments as well. Our players have been requesting an Alice themed course for quite a while and this seemed to be an opportunity for us to go back to the source material for our inspiration.
You’ve mentioned drawing inspiration from the original 1865 edition with John Tenniel’s etchings. How did those iconic illustrations influence the visual design of the course?
Although our modern collective image of Alice comes from a variety of visual interpretations of the landscape and characters, we wanted to see if we could embody our version of the characters from the often very strange depictions in the original book. Since Lewis Carroll’s story was created as not only a child’s adventure in a strange world, it also brings in humorous references to the politics and characters of the time when it was written. John Tenniel also pulls reference from sketches by Da Vinci in the depiction of The Duchess, and many of sensibilities of the characters comes from the Victorian era it was created within.
The book’s theme of curiosity and transformation seems like a natural fit for VR. Were there specific scenes or moments from the story that you felt were “made” for VR mini golf?
Because previous interpretations of Alice’s adventure played a little fast and loose with the characters and locations, we wanted to try and stay true to the original story and to the progression of events as Alice experiences them. We have, guiltily, pulled a couple of moments from the Looking Glass world, but on the whole our aim was to transport you into Carroll’s book… with the slight addition of you being able to play a round of mini golf while you are there.
What were some of the biggest challenges in adapting Wonderland’s dreamlike logic into a course that’s also fun and functional to play?
Probably the biggest challenge we faced while attempting to recreate Carroll’s Wonderland is that he doesn’t describe the landscape. The book is a series of encounters with little reference for how each of these moments are physically connected. In one’s imagination it would be easy to think of Wonderland as a dream, or a black void where the Duchess, Mad Hatter, and Cheshire Cat appear as vignetted pools of light. We have tried to make Wonderland “a place” but we have also given each character encounter a theatrical spotlight that allows them to be unique while remaining part of a larger whole.
With this being such an iconic literary world, how do you strike a balance between nostalgia and giving the experience a fresh, Mighty Coconut spin?
It took a while before we could wrap our heads around how we would present Wonderland as a Walkabout course. It was Walkabout’s creator, Lucas Martell, who decided we should embrace the idea of being “underground” and he crafted a mobius strip layout of oversized roots that the course is laid out upon. We want each environment to be discovered as the game play unfolds, but it also needs to work in “God Mode” as a whole. I am really pleased by how much of an adventure the experience is, all enhanced by the fact that the players can change their size throughout the course.
Beyond the Wonderland DLC, are there other literary or fantastical worlds or genres you’d love to reinterpret in mini golf form someday?
Literary classics are a treasure trove for potential future courses, but they need to immediately offer a touch of wish fulfillment for prospective players. Like the Jules Verne courses, we need to offer places that our players have always wanted to go to. Unlike books or films, VR offers you the chance to place your feet right in the soil of these literary places, and best of all you get to share that experience with friends and family. As Lucas likes to say, “What is the ‘Noun’ of this prospective new course?”, which translates to, “What does even the mention of a new course immediately inspire in potential future players?”. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the perfect “Noun”, it offers a place we all want to go, we are all familiar with, and we can easily imagine inhabiting… together.
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