Dear Insane Children, 

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in a place where that makes sense! And to those in the other places, we can still give thanks! I give thanks (HUGE THANKS) to you, our Insane Children, for making all this possible. Not just the art, story, and design work we’re doing – but the community, the collective creation, and the shared feeling of accomplishment. I’ve said it before but… I am having a BLAST working on this with you. And am hugely appreciative of your support. Thank you!

Though it’s a holiday for a lot of you, the Spice Must Flow! And our creative output is still on Full Blast! So I’m back today with a second (mini) part to the previous update in which I outlined my thinking for the General Narrative Presentation of Asylum. 

That presentation inspired some new artwork from Omri (above) and some questions from our Insane Children. So let’s tackle those and see where it takes us! 

BTW, If you’ve not already figured it out… HUGE SPOILER WARNINGS! HUGE! 

First up, Omri says (of the new dress design):

still Wip and also i need to design the back

like i said, my problem with the Ash dress is that it’s not different enough from the Original blue dress and also technically there’s no space to place Leds on the dress to create those lights on it.

In this i integrated the Ash with the Alchemy stuff, i took designs from the Hatter’s outfit, i took in consideration that where the cosplayers will place the Led to create that red fire light in the fabric. I also took inspiration from welder’s outfits. i this works but need tweaking and i need to do the back.

I want to rework it some more, i like the hair, i hope other people will too.

So what do you think of this new “Ash Dress” (version 2) plus “Alchemy Dress” for Alice’s attire when she goes to visit Hatter? 

Leave your feedback in the comments! 

Questions From The Inmates

A couple of you put forth some excellent questions to my previous post. 

 Gregory Paraubek wrote: 

QUESTION:   Is the initial “loop” that Child Alice stuck in part of the stages of grief or is it a state of existence prior to traversing them? If the former, is she trapped in Shock, exploring Denial without care, or going through all the stages?

Or is it the latter, and the Hatter’s experiment and the breaching arrival of the Mystery what triggers Shock?  Does the fire happen, Child Alice goes through Shock (in which perhaps she loses her Shadow/the splitting of Alices), and then loops through Denial until the Mystery arrives?

I wonder if endless loops through Bad Stuff wouldn’t leave the Child jaded to a point where they wouldn’t want to proceed through the adventure, would danger that threatens something idyllic be a good motivator for action?

The Loop is the stages of grief played over and over inside this bubble of reality where Child Alice has become stuck. Imagine it like a self-contained little Snow Globe of Wonderland where Young Alice traverses the landscape of trauma over and over. I imagine by the time we meet her she’s grown tired of going the more difficult/painful places and mostly dwells in Denial (until something triggers her and sends her to Anger or Bargaining, etc).

(That, btw, has me thinking about Triggers as a means of kicking the player around the various stages of the game). 

Imagine that the fire happened, she went into PTSD, spent years bouncing around the various stages in great pain and anger. She eventually managed to settle most of the time in Denial or Depression but has never been able to fully exit The Loop. 

When the explosion happens it’s triggered by, well, us. We’re picking up the thread of the narrative at the end of Madness Returns. Outside of The Loop, there’s Adult Alice trying to examine herself after the events of AMR… Peering into the Snow Globe and realizing that she’s broken. She needs to find and heal her Inner Child. So she tries breaking through the glass of that Snow Globe… but her efforts are viewed from the inside as violent attacks.  

Sarah Heist asks:

QUESTION: So would we then- seeing through the eyes of Child Alice- view Adult Alice as the dark “Shadow Alice” ?

I purposely avoided any mention of “Shadow Alice” in that post because I feel it’s caused confusion in the past. Whether or not we ultimately decide that Adult Alice is the same as Shadow Alice… I don’t know just yet. I imagine we’re first going to see Young Alice’s view of The Mystery as an invading dark blob/fog turning everything it touches to … shadow? 

Then Alice will realize that The Mystery is actually some version of herself – a Through The Looking Glass dark refection. And she’ll finally understand that she’s viewing herself “all grown up.” Peering out from inside the Snow Globe at her future self.

QUESTION: Is the final battle between adult Alice and child Alice or is it both against all of wonderland for the transformation to be complete?

Probably both. My current thinking is that the Wonderland of Young Alice must be Dissolved in order for Integration and Transformation to be made complete. But before Young Alice is willing to accept who/what The Mystery is (Adult Alice) she’ll have to fight it. 

During or after that fight we’ll reveal the true nature of The Mystery. After that… it’s going to be Alice vs. Wonderland as Young Alice overcomes the obstacles necessary to initiate The Dissolving.

QUESTION: Can/will there be multiple endings or one fixed storyline? Or can there be the illusion of free will choice in the game but with the same general result ? 

Haven’t thought about the multiple endings thing yet. But I would like to present an ending which warps the player’s brain a bit in terms of violating expectations. Still working on that. 

QUESTION: Would we be meeting Hatter before Bargaining then, accordingto the outline? When/how would that happen? 

Hatter’s Domain still represents Bargaining. But I think it’s Hatter who is the character representing Bargaining (not Alice). He’s the one who stumbled on the nature of their reality (a closed loop) and understands in his own way what The Mystery means (transformation of Wonderland in current form to something new and unknown). 

Because of this reframing of his role and the knowledge he contains I believe we’ll need to move up the timing of his appearance in the story. 

Right now I’m thinking something like: Denial->Anger->Bargaining->???

That sequence would also be interspersed with flashbacks and memories of the fire, the asylum, etc. Still work in progress!

More questions from Angel Wings… 

QUESTION:   OK we’re going to need a chart. We’ll work on that later, but for now we have a question. The loop, it is the prelude chapter world, yes? And then the explosion, or breach or shock is what tips it into the first chapter. 

Yeah, we’re going to need a chart… but we always need a chart! 🙂 Charts are great!

As for The Loop and timing… I think *we* (the players, the game) initiate The Explosion which knocks the world out of The Loop and starts the narrative of Asylum. This might be the meta aspect of the game which we later use for the brain warp game ending. 

James Olson commented: 

QUESTION:  Since this is self contained, is this like an adult Alice looking back at that child part of her that was hurt and working through the trauma as a child? To recognize that as a child, you don’t have the same faculties as an adult so when dealing with trauma, especially at a very young age, there is all emotion and little logical thought. 

Our perspective would be 100% that of Child Alice. So we (audience) won’t know what it is that’s trying to destroy Wonderland (Adult Alice) until quite a way into the story. [Except you… you’re reading all these spoilers!] So we’re seeing everything through a child’s eyes as these terrifying changes start ripping apart a place she’d made her sanctuary (as mad as it might be). 

That’s it for today. Again, take some time to digest all of that and let me know if you’ve got any follow up questions. I really LOVE your questions because they help me sort out my thinking and organize my view of how best to present things. 

From Shanghai in a Snow Globe,

-American

Dear Insane Children, 

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about PTSD and Transformation. And much of this thinking – as with much of my creative output in recent years – draws on a personal encounter with Chaos I experienced a few years back. I won’t go into detail other than to say these events resulted in a complete breakdown for me – emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Font Lord was there during the worst of it and can attest to how consuming, painful, damaging, and ultimately transformative the experience was. 

So when I write of PTSD and its immediate and lingering effects, I’m drawing heavily on personal experience and all the literature I consumed in the process of trying to heal myself. “Out of the Woods” was an attempt to channel the experience into a creative endeavor. I wanted to retell those classic fairytales because they contain a lot of the original Rules for the Avoidance of Chaos. After my experience, I thought a handy, graphically illustrated reminder would be useful for myself and others. 

And to this day I’m still struggling with the last remnants of that encounter. Triggers and pains which serve as daily reminders of the powerful lessons I was forced to learn and the transformation I had to undertake (and am still undertaking). 

Despite those pains, I can say that the transformation has led to a place where I am happier, healthier, and more alive than I’ve ever been. So there is a reason to hope that these encounters serve a purpose and can lead to a better place. Keep that in mind if you’re currently struggling. 

It’s no coincidence that Alice’s confrontation with Chaos and the return to the Child Self is being presented here-and-now. All of this is strangely serendipitous. I could not explore this story if I had not experienced that awful recent trauma. And, strangely, this mirrors how I channeled my childhood traumas into the narrative of AMA and AMR. Those stories were of my inner child told through the lens of “adult” Alice. Now it seems I’m channeling my adult trauma through “child” Alice. 

Well… they say writers are always telling their own stories. 

What they don’t say is that a writer’s own story is always changing.

The Illusion of Control

Pain is the brain’s way of protecting us from future harm. PTSD is the pain response pushed into relentless overdrive by exposure to an event so traumatic we’re unable or unwilling to cope with it. Unable to “get over it” the trauma consumes and destroys us. 

After an encounter with Chaos, we spend hours and days reliving the past, trying to make sense of what happened. Conversations and moments are relived over and over. It’s in these replays that we jump between states – shock, anger, bargaining, depression – trying to regain our understanding of reality. 

The problem is that reality is shattered. The rules no longer apply. What we thought we understood – the constants that defined our existence – are now violated and irrational. Everything on that side of the equation is changed. And our notion of grasping (let alone modifying) anything on that side of the equation is destroyed.

The illusion of control is gone.

If we’re lucky we might eventually realize that unless we change things on OUR side of the equation, we’ll never establish a new reality. 

But that sort of change doesn’t happen with the common elements we carry around in our pockets. We can’t sprinkle a bit of Salt on the situation and watch it transform into another common (and harmless) element. 

The required change is more fundamental than that. It requires dissolving. 

A Dissolving of Self

Dissolving is difficult and painful. It’s also described as “Ego Death” – a process in which we’re forced to face and dismantle the hall of illusions we’ve constructed around ourselves. So we avoid it…

One of the ways people avoid the fundamental transformation required to evolve after an encounter with Chaos (PTSD) is to busy themselves with new projects. They put effort into external problems over which they can feel some sort of control. But this only delays the required transformation. The Chaos elements are still scattered about the scene of the explosion. Ignored. Untransformed. 

Occasionally we trip over them. A “trigger” sends us reeling back to the events and outcomes of that thing that blew us to bits. 

What’s The Story?  

Those are the themes we’re exploring in Alice’s “Asylum” adventure.  And here’s how I imagine we present them:

Our story is told from Child Alice’s perspective. It’s the story of a young girl caught in a loop – visiting the various domains of Wonderland over and over, trying to solve a puzzle that can never be solved. This routine has gone on for years and years with no change until one day there’s a great explosion. 

Hatter’s increasingly complex experiments have ripped apart the reality surrounding his domain. In his effort to understand the nature of Wonderland – its basic elements, dimensions, and constants – he’s cracked open a gateway through which The Mystery is flowing. 

We don’t yet know what form The Mystery takes (hence the name) but we do know that it’s dark, terrifying, and can’t be trusted. Everything it touches is consumed in shadow and it will eventually consume Wonderland if nothing is done to stop it.

Hatter implores Alice to travel Wonderland, collect the necessary (alchemy) elements, and heal the cracks forming in their reality. If she fails in this all is lost. 

Alice must now confront a combination of internal and external threats. Wonderland was already transformed into something broken and treacherous. And now this new external threat is seeping in and destroying everything.

An enemy within. An enemy without. 

The core revelation elements for this narrative are: 

• At age 13 Alice cleaved herself in two. 
• The half that “got busy” is the one we know from AMA and AMR. 
• That Alice ran forward, knife in hand, to fight the dragons and slay the demons. 
• And she eventually prevailed in killing the antagonist (Bumby). 
• But something remained broken. She must dissolve and reform to complete the journey.
• Child Alice must be rescued from the PTSD loop and reintegrated. 
• But Child Alice is fighting from within against the forces of transformation.
• In her battle against The Mystery, Child Alice will eventually realize what it represents.
• A reintegrated Alice must finally fight to dissolve Wonderland so it can be reborn.

The Mystery

Alice’s other half – The Inner Child – is trapped in the past, stuck in a loop, reliving the horrors of the encounter with Chaos. Her world is a place of disorder and confusion from which she cannot escape. She’s been around and around the place, dozens of times – think “Groundhog Day” – and played all the scenarios from every angle.  

Adult Alice’s attempts to enter this place are frustrated by Young Alice.  

The Mystery is the manifestation of Adult Alice attempting to reconnect with her Inner Child. But viewed through the eyes of a child, the mature, shadow self of Adult Alice is alien and scary. She does not recognize The Mystery as her adult self. And what The Mystery calls “integration” Child Alice calls “destruction.” 

The Presentation

Presented in this way, we’re able to re-tell the story of AMA, AMR, and Asylum from a perspective (of Child Alice) that allows “discovery” of the elements veteran players already know. For someone coming to the franchise for the first time, this means they can play Asylum without first needing to experience either of the first two games. 

This also means that Asylum is a self-contained beginning-middle-and end for the series. 

But Wait! There’s More!

There is more but I want to pause here while everyone takes a moment to think about what’s been outlined. It will probably take me a couple of attempts to fully capture why what I’ve outlined above is important to constructing the narrative I think we need for this game. Your comments and questions will help me understand where to sketch in more detail. So…

You know the drill. Read. Think. And then drop your feedback in the comments below!

I’m very much looking forward to your thoughts.

From Shanghai with Mystery, 

-American

Dear Insane Children, 

Happy Off With Turkey Head Week! How’s everyone doing? Lots of people traveling home for the holidays? Looks like a “weather bomb” about to hit the USA. Everyone stay safe out there. Here in China, we’re planning a small family dinner – and, yes, we have turkey! – which will be Lucky’s first Thanksgiving. Awww. 

Creative Dissolve

My work on defining the how-what-why of Hatter’s Domain continues. In terms of words on paper, it’s mostly there… but I’ve spent hours thinking about the narrative implications of Hatter’s experiments – and findings – and how those work into the overarching stories for Young Alice and Regular Alice (Old Alice? Modern Alice? She needs a better name!). 

I’m almost ready to present what I have in mind (maybe later today) but in the meantime, there’s a conversation with Omri (and art!) I’d like to share. Omri writes… 

we are going into the Hatter’s realm and we did already show this a while back. but i think we can show it again because it’s still kinda unresolved.

I redesigned then the dress from that look of that gray shirt thing because it wasn’t detailed/styled enough in comparison to the other outfits that Alice wears before and after that realm.

it looked like a cheap version of an outfit and also we already used something similar in the actual Asylum.

this “outfit” is like a dress made from rags. i think you can repost these and if people won’t like it, this is the time to redesign it. i think that for Queensland it seems that people love the red dress we created and for Denial, the Yellow one, Shock Bunny onesie. Only slumber’s outfit needs to be designed.

To which I replied: 

Good to revisit this. Back when we were initially working on the dresses and thinking of Hatter’s realm as reflecting Alice’s pleading/bargaining stage… a dress like this made sense. Now that I am re-working the meaning of the Hatter’s (Bargaining) Stage and what it means to the overall narrative of the game I think it would make sense to redesign this dress. 

We need to add this new thinking into the mix: The basic concept I’m working with is that Hatter’s discovered through his experiments that there’s something working to destroy Wonderland from the outside. He’s mapped out the nature and shape of Wonderland as best he’s able – with his last experiment causing an explosion that destroyed his lab (and most of his domain). And in the process, he’s become aware of a dark (Chaos) force which seeks to undermine the foundations of Wonderland, kill all its inhabitants, and kidnap Alice. 

In this scenario, it’s Hatter who is the avatar for Bargaining since he’s the one who is imploring Alice to help fight against the external force working to destroy Wonderland. He’s trying to maintain the status quo. 

We might consider a couple of possibilities for her dress in this context: 

First, a “status quo” dress would simply be the Classic Blue Dress. 

Next, an “alchemy dress” might represent Hatter’s realm and the method he’s used in uncovering the threat. 

Or we could represent the broken nature of this realm with a patchwork “blown apart” dress? Nah…

I dunno… looking at your timeline of dresses… I am kinda leaning towards the Classic Dress. It would be the first time we’ve shown that to Player in the current story. And it certainly carries a lot of “status quo” meaning. 

A bit of a reveal around what I have in mind for Hatter’s Domain – and the game narrative in general. 

And a question as to redesigning a new Bargaining Dress or going with the Classic Dress for this stage. 

Have a think and let us know in the comments below what you think!

From Shanghai with Gobble, Gobble,

-American

Dear Insane Children

Font Lord here again with the results of both the Patreon and Public surveys about what pins are most desirable.
Honestly, I felt a little silly making 2 pics about this due to how similar they are, but hey ho, here we go…

The approval rating written next to each one shown as a percentage.
The one you most want to kill highlighted in red.
The top 3 you most like to see as the special pin marked in green.

————-

There you go.
It seems that Patrons seem to want ‘coat of arms’ style pins more than the general populace. Maybe because you’re all part of our awesome gang/secret society?   🙂

Now I guess pretty soon, we’ll make the final decision on what are the ‘standard 4’ and which is the special one and we can move forwards with more production.

Speaking of which, we have a little news from the factory that some of our designs might be a little on the complex side of things for the size we requested, so we’re now in contact with them asking more questions about size and complexity. But how do you feel about that?
What should be the ‘height’ of enamel pins in your opinion?
Please let us know in millimeters.

– Cheers

Dear Insane Children  

Font Lord here, taking some time from walking the grounds of Font Manor to give you all a little update on the current results of the enamel pin survey.  

From almost 400 votes cast in total, we have…
By a country mile, option D is the most unpopular.  
Seriously, we had to go and check that we’d set up the survey correctly it was THAT far behind everything else.   Poor guy   🙁

Then surprising absolutely no one at all.  We find that A is way out in front with an almost 90% approval rating.
And G, H and E following closely behind.

But also G and H are leading the race in terms of what should be the special pin as well, meaning that one of our mid-tier-popularity pins such as J and I will likely be one of the ‘standard 4’.

We also thought we’d open the poll to the public too.
(don’t worry, it’s a duplicate survey, not the same one you’re voting on).
We’re curious to see if public opinion lines up with Patron opinion, and honestly, we also just wanted to see if D was REALLY that bad in everyone’s eyes   😀

Now please excuse me, I need to go throw bottles of my pee and poop at ghosts while I try and deliver some post-apocalyptic parcels!

– Cheers

Dear Insane Children, 

We have TEN PINS designed by Jen to choose from. 

We need FOUR for the Main Set. And we need ONE for the Patreon Exclusive.

 And then there were nine. We need to kill off a couple of pindians!  

To help with the selection process I’ve created a survey where you can:

• Rate Each Pin
• Select A Favorite Pin
• Murder A Pin

Hit THIS LINK to input your ratings and do your killing!

Things To Keep In Mind

We’re aiming to create a set of high-quality enamel pins with a minimal range of color or just black/silver. The theme of the set is “secret society” with a hint of dark magic. You know the stuff. Like this…

These will be offered initially as a Patreon Exclusive… probably at the $35 Tier. 

We’re working with Backerkit to create a Group-buy Page to automate your selection process and get rid of the need for Tier shifting and all that confusing nonsense. More on this soon.

Expect these to be made available here on Patreon in January or February. We want to skip the Christmas rush and we need to give Backerkit time to get everything in place. 

There will be a backing card for the 4-Pin Set. We need to design graphics for that. I’m wondering if we might also make foldable so you can create an origami pin holder? 

Don’t know yet if the Exclusive Pin needs a backing card. Thoughts?

The Patreon Exclusive Pin will come with a Locking Back – per your request!

We’ll keep the survey open for a while. And I might promote it outside of Patreon if we don’t get enough input to be useful. So… go be useful! 

What else? Let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

From Shanghai With Dark Magic,

-American