Closing Scene Illustrations

Dear Insane Children, 

Without revealing too much of the actual story (spoilers), I thought to share some of the illustrations by Omri from the ending scenes of the game. Here’s the art request outline for this section: 

45.2) Alice locates Angela / Narrative Closing Scenes – Page 165-166 (v2.1)

Art Briefing and Output:?
(Render at least 2x Images)

Render the closing scenes of Alice’s journey in Asylum.
?Image 1: ?
Level design scene of Alice searching for Angela in Radcliffe’s Mansion.
?Image 2: ?
Closing Scene of Alice interacting with Angela. Render scene as described in the narrative. Include the Rabbit and the focus on the bond between ?Alice and ?Angela.

?Optional:
?This brief is open to catch as many interactions with Alice and the characters mentioned in the story here as possible. Anything that adds emotional weight and conclusion to the story is welcome.

One interesting thing you might notice about the image above is that Omri decided (for some unknown reason) to include a picture of Lewis Carroll. And so I had to write a note to him and said, “Please, don’t do that.” 

Not sure how many of you are aware of this… but I’ve always worked to avoid any mention of Carroll in the games. I started out doing this simply because I felt his inclusion didn’t help Alice’s narrative. What sort of relationship would we want him to have with the Alice in our games? And does it even make sense that he’d be there? 

One could frame the question in this way: Was Carroll in his own books with the fictional Alice who traveled to Wonderland? I don’t recall that he was. So if our Alice (Game Alice) is the one that travels to Wonderland… then she’s a derivative of the character from the books. And we could say she was created by – but never actually met – Carroll. That’s my logic anyway. 

Later, I began to distance Game Alice from Carroll because there was just too much controversy around him. And I have no idea what to believe. And given the nature of the controversy, it seems it would make Game Alice’s story even more complicated. 

Perhaps there’s an angle there? If we knew, with complete certainty, that Carroll engaged in some sort of inappropriate relationship with (real) Alice, then the games could be viewed as some sort of reflection of that situation. But… we’ve never gone there. And I don’t really see the point in it now. So… 

I asked Omri to remove that portrait of Carroll. 

And, yes, I know there’s a similar portrait of him in the original “Alice” game but I never wanted that in there. And one of the developers snuck it in without my approval. Meh.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic in the comments below. 

Shanghai Update: Still too shaky out there for us to feel comfortable with Martin coming over for a Live Stream. But we do talk about it often and are doing our best to make one happen soon. 

From Shanghai with Love, 

-American

Out With The Old, In With The New!

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here.

Just letting you know that once again we have run out of art print shelf space so have retired a bunch of prints to make space for new future awesome ones.
Let’s all press F to pay our respects!

The 4 prints in this post are now no longer available individually and I have created a couple of “Double Tube” products on Mysterious for the last 5ish remaining stock of each. Click here to see…

* Surprise Guest + Flamingo
* Card Guard + White Rabbit 

As you can imagine, when they’re gone, they’re gone so snap up these double-bargains while you can!

– Big hugs from my 37 degree room in Shanghai… phew!

Some Cake (no spoilers)

Dear Insane Children, 

For those of you who didn’t want to click on the previous post (because spoilers) but felt left out because you didn’t get to see some awesome art… 

I got you covered!

Here’s a new illustration from Joey of a Giant Alice with CAKE in hand… 

Joey says:

Alice holding a piece of disgusting cake in her hand, she is huge right now, her house shattered into pieces, black tentacles dancing behind her.

Indeed. 

So… have your illustration and eat your cake too!

From Shanghai with Love, 

-American 

Vengeance is Awesome (amazing art but spoilers, sorry)

Dear Insane Children,

I don’t know if you know this (I think many of you do) but the Alice series is extremely cathartic for me. Because, as a child, I was abused in many ways – psychological, physical, and sexual. And by a wide variety of people – family members, caretakers, and strangers.

(trigger warning – sexual abuse stuff)

Last night, I had a nightmare about one instance. And I woke up this morning feeling angry, sad, and generally upset.

I thought back to a few years ago, this particular abuser resurfaced when a family member visited Shanghai. Over lunch, and quite casually, she asked, “So, did John (alias) get to you too?” John was her step-brother. He’d abused me on multiple occasions as a child but I never said a word about it to anyone. To hear her ask this question… my blood ran cold. 

He’d abused her. He’d abused me. And he’d abused many other children… She thought I knew I wasn’t alone. I did not. It didn’t make me feel better knowing there had been many others. In this, I’d have preferred to remain alone.

But she let me know that he’d finally (at age 50) gone to prison forever. Convicted of a rape-murder apparently. Many years too late… but justice at last. 

So when I sat down to review recent images from the Alice: Asylum pre-production team, I had a dark laugh at the latest from Adam (main image above – awesome work, Adam!). 

For those who’ve read the Narrative Outline, you’ll recognize this as the End Scene. 

For those who haven’t… well, spoilers

Simply put… The ending of Asylum has Alice turn into a child predator hunter… using her Wonderland powers in the real world and tentacle mind raping them to death. The “Little Black Book” she takes from Radcliffe serves as a map, guiding Alice on her missions of vengeance. And when she finds her prey… woo, boy. Watch out! 

Seeing stuff like this… makes me happy. At least as happy as you can feel about this sort of thing. And I hope that others out there who share in this sort of terrible history can also find some solace in witnessing vengeance served to those who most deserve it.

Omri did a fine rendition of the End Game dress. 

From Shanghai with Vengeance, 

-American

Sleep No More

Dear Insane Children, 

As Martin mentioned in the last update, we are “free” – but some of us are freer than others. While it’s true that we have freedom to move around the city… I’m lacking in a certain critical freedom unique to our household: Freedom to Sleep! 

I guess you could say I am free *from* sleep. I don’t even know if I am making sense. What I’m trying to say is, Leeloo is keeping us awake all day and night. Compared to Lucky, she’s a handful (multiple handfuls). But we’re hoping this phase passes quickly and we can get back to our regular sleep schedule. 

Speaking of schedules, yeah, we might be back to our regular Live Stream schedule soon. Mainly up to Martin… he has to decide when he’s ready to commit to visiting our house… and potentially ending up trapped here if there’s another sudden lockdown. 

Meanwhile…

The Alice: Asylum pre-production team continues to crank out tons of great art.

This is a character simply referred to as “The Lord.” You get to kick his butt… but in his brain. I don’t want to say more because (spoilers). But if you’re interested in knowing where he fits into the Asylum narrative, you’ll find him in Narrative Outline (right at the end). 

Alice does some freaky Otherlands stuff to him. Don’t worry… he deserves it. Awesome art by Adam. 

And speaking of Otherlands… the creature sketch above from Norm is an idea for the sort of monsters we’ll find lurking inside the mind of Radcliffe. 

A top hot guy with pens for legs who spews money. What did you expect to find inside the mind of a lawyer? 

And when you run into these kinds of monsters… you’ll need weapons and AMMO:

Those are ammo ideas from Gareth (yeah, he’s doing art on Asylum again!). These would be projectiles used by the Croquet Mallet weapon. 

Ok, that’s it for now. I need to go drink more coffee. 

From Shanghai with Zzzzz, 

-American 

Art Print Shipping Update

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here.  
It’s been a while since we chatted   🙂 

Just letting you know that now Shanghai lockdown is pretty much over, we are all trying to get back on top of things, which of course means clearing the backlog of Patreon rewards.

So those of you who have been waiting on the last few months of prints (that you can see in this post), and also those of you at the 3x$35 level, do not fret, we’ll be sending these out in the coming week or so! Which means that they will probably start arriving with you mid to late July.

We’re also going to be getting back into the swing of Live-Steams again in the not too distant future, likely to be mid-late-June, so please look out for updates about that.
I hope we can still remember how to be entertaining in front of the camera for 2 hours  😉

From Shanghai with freedom

– Cheers