Dear Insane Children,
We’re BACK after a week of R&R. Seems my throat really needed that. All better now! Pain is gone! And I guess we now know that I shouldn’t eat tons of spicy food during the day and citrus fruit right before I go to bed. Hur dur. Lesson learned!
And while it’s been quiet here on Patreon there’s still tons going on behind the scenes. Our team of Artists and Designers (powered by YOUR support) continue to crank out ideas for The Domain of the Queen of Hearts.
Dungeons are getting sketched…
And (as seen in the main image above) the “Sun Furnace,” which represents Anger being harnessed to power the Queen’s ambitious, now includes a lot more detail.
Of the Sun concept Omri says:
I’ve been doodling for a while, i keep imagine the sun located underneath the castle, having cages with card soldiers and inhabitants locked in there to transform into killing machines.
i keep seeing it upside down. i have no clue why, i just do.
that once you leave the last/lowest floor of the castle and enter the area with the large sun machine, everything turns upside down and also i designed the way the sun is captured kind of like an observatory, again, i just feel that it fits artistically.
This is where the cards will transform,i think theoretically… this will make sense visually.
fire and brimstone cards and after you kill of of them in AMA you play against the “normal looking” cards which are actually the cards that didn’t go under the treatment. it’s a thought.
Which inspired Norm to invent some Mechanical Card Guards…
Compared to their paper-based brothers these metal monsters thrive in (are maybe powered by?) the atmosphere of the Sun Chamber. That takes “solar-powered” to a whole new place!
Here Comes The Moon
I think it’s safe to bet that the Insane Children count Halloween as their favorite holiday. Certainly, it’s mine! And so some effort is going into preparation for the event including this witchy Halloween Poster from Omri. WOooooOOo…
Truth is there’s so much new artwork… it’s like we need some sort of live broadcast over the Internet to go through each piece and discuss it at length…
Live Stream!
Time for another Live Stream over on YouTube! We’ve set it for the usual time slot – Thursday morning @ 10AM in Shanghai – 7PM Wednesday if you’re on the USA West Coast.
Hit THIS LINK to head over to YouTube and set a reminder.
We have a TON of stuff to go through. And we’ll be giving away Cheshire Kitten Sets as prizes. Woo!
Can’t wait until Wednesday to get your Alice: Asylum online fix? Fear not!
Crowd Design – Who Is Shadow Alice?
We will have another Crowd Design session tomorrow – that’s Monday at 8PM in the US and Tuesday at 10AM in Hong Kong.
We have Crowd Design Sessions every other week (like the Live Streams) – but we use our Discord Server so that everyone can be included with voice and text chat.
What is Discord and how do you join our server? Well, there’s a POST FOR THAT.
At the request of one of our Insane Children (Asteria Visual), we’re going to explore the topic of Shadow Alice.
I feel like the idea of Shadow Alice is pretty simple but I recognize that I might have previously couched it in fuzzy psycho-babble which could have made the topic murkier than it should have been. That sort of framing makes sense when we’re presenting the notion to Player in the final product but might be less helpful when we’re discussing the idea during the design phase.
So here’s the concept with all the woo-woo stripped away:
First off, the basic premise of the narrative: We must go back in order to go forward. And we must re-integrate with the Child Self in order to completely heal.
Why? Re-integration with The Child Self if the final step. It’s safe again.
And it allows the Third Chapter (Alice: Asylum) – which actually takes place in a time *before* Adult Alice’s resolution with Bumby (Alice: Madness Returns) – to provide the closing scene for the saga.
- 13-Year Old Alice (Young Alice) is sent to The Asylum after the death of her family.
- Young Alice is severely broken – unable to eat, sleep, speak, cope – and needs to heal herself.
- Young Alice ventures into Wonderland and fights her way through challenges – sprinkled with visions of a dark “Shadow Alice” – which lead to her to a Final Boss Battle(TM) – and presumably The Healing.
- But instead of a glorious win and escape from Wonderland… Young Alice is confronted by Adult Alice – who we now realize is the same dark “Shadow Alice” we’ve been haunted by all along.
- The two battle back across Wonderland in various scenes where Young Alice percieved Shadow Alice had thwarted or threatened her…
- Only to realize that Shadow Alice had been helping her (sometimes by challenging her) through hundreds of iterations of the same adventure, over and over again.
- Adult Alice is here to extract Young Alice from The Past…
- Adult Alice and Young Alice experience a reunification and The Healing is complete.
That’s the basic outline we can discuss during the Crowd Design Session tomorrow.
Please join us!
But wait!
Great Firewall Woes
To celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Wonders of Communism(TM) the PRC Government has further squashed the free flow of information across the Internet. The Great Firewall is operating at 1000% these days. Which means that all our online plans may be thwarted before they even begin. Hell, while writing this post I had to reboot the VPN router twice. Not good!
These “celebrations” are supposed to go through the end of the month… Sigh.
Anyway, you know the drill. Join us. We’ll see how the Internet holds up.
From Behind the Firewall with Love,
-American