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Exploring, Shock, and Family
🕑 Added 2019-06-10 00:41:12 +0000 UTCDear Insane Children,
American here with a long-overdue update. First, an apology for the delay since my last post. As many of you know, my mother, step-father, and Yan's mom are all visiting Shanghai these days. This is my mother's first visit to China since I left the US 15 years ago. And we've taken them all around the city and surrounding area to view the sights and eat lots of yummy food. They are having a blast but I hardly have any time in the day for work or updates.
Meanwhile our team of artists continue their efforts on outlining the characters, locations, and other critical elements we'll see in Alice: Asylum. My work with various biz and finance aspects of the project have also continued - with some good (but unshare-able) progress there as well.
Slumber and Shock
The art-design team effort is mainly focused on the early stages of Asylum. We're starting at the beginning with the game starting at Alice's home...
Where we'll see Alice and her sister playing in the snow.
I'm hoping to use the snow/ash motif throughout the game and so we'll start referencing that imagery from the first frame of the game.
Now as much as I love a snowman melting into a horror-skull... I don't think it makes sense to hit this sort of note only a minute into the game. In fact, I'd like to spend quite a bit of time (15~10 minutes?) in solemn exploration of the Liddell family home.
There will be plenty of time for horror later. And I think it's important to fully illustrate the happy home life Alice had viciously taken from her.
So these initial opening scene sketches will need some revisions... but it's still fun to explore various ways we might open the game.
What's your response to the Opening Action trend we see in so many movies/games these days? Do you miss the slow, intentional build-up of traditional horror/drama films ("The Shining" is a great example)?
Work is also being done to establish a look/feel for Alice and her family. Here's an initial attempt by Norm (left) where Omri (right) has done a bit of editing. This pre-trauma Alice strikes me as a bit "dopey" ... but then she's yet to face the Chaos which transforms her into the heroin we all know and love. So perhaps this is the right direction?
And here are renders of sister and mom. No sign yet of Keanu-Dad.
Some preliminary work is also being done on the transition phase between Shock and Denial. The idea here being that Alice spends most of Shock in Stealth-Type game play and ends up being chased from that section by a growing army of monsters.
The "Shock Manifest" creature pictured at the top of this post is an example of the sort of enemy we might encounter during Shock. I really like the thinking behind this monster and can picture large areas filled with these creatures in their idle state - rocking silently back and forth. In my feedback on these creatures I suggested that we might see them grow to a variety of different sizes - some roughly the same size as Alice while others tower over her. This would echo the reality of Triggers - and how you try to avoid them so that you don't activate the recollection of a trauma. But a trauma, once activated, might grow to a minor annoyance or blossom into a truly crippling emotional storm.
Crowd Design
We'll host another Crowd Design session via Discord tomorrow morning (Shanghai time). That's at 6PM PST on Monday.
You can learn about our Discord server via THIS LINK. If you've been a Patron for at least a month at $5 (or more) then you'll have access to Discord. Please join us while we discuss the design, story, and art of Asylum!
Tags & Kittens
The Asylum Tags are being manufactured! And we're expecting another revision on the Cheshire Kitten Plush design. I'll post more on these two topics next time - but in the meantime, fear not! Good progress being made on those fronts.
More to Explore
I'm off to another day of exploring the wonders of China with my family. And I really appreciate your patience while I spend time with them. I'll post an update about our sightseeing once they've left and the dust has settled. These are their last few days before heading back to the US.
From Shanghai with Love,
-American (and Family)
Comments
Pytress Lowrey
I like the idea for the first stage being stealth, she's probably not going to be ready to fight immediately. For the starting scenes, I like the idea of giving the audience time to see Alice's home. We've never really seen this before even though we had the little memories in AMA2, which gave us an idea of the parents personalities. A thought: At this point, we know about the fire's cause from AMA2: Madness Returns, so maybe some sort of call back to that but not so blatant that it could be a spoiler would work to give us the idea that something's not right or about to happen. A reason for the shadows and noises other people have commented about.
Chaussette
I love the mouth monster, maybe it could have a rotten tongue that tries to grab/lick stuff? Or it could be vomiting some nasty goo. I agree with not starting the game at 100% action/horror. I'm watching a lot of horror movies, good and bad ones, and something I noticed they do sometimes is to give the audience a "feeling" that something bad is about to happen. Like they would show a normal everyday scene but include sudden loud noises/some shadows and weird shit to startle the audience without really showing anything spooky. I think it's really interesting. About the mine concept, I like the idea, the only thing I don't understand is the meaning of "clearing" in the first box. I feel like it's not necessary to indicate the exit with a word, if the level is built properly the player will understand where to go.
