Dear Insane Children,
As I continue to write through the narrative outline for Alice: Asylum, I’ve come to a point where the main scenes that define the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Act are written (or outlined and ready to be written)… but where there’s room to explore the Series of Adventures that define Alice’s path to victory during the 2nd Act. In other words, she’s given her Clear Goal(s) at the end of the 1st Act and sets off to overcome all obstacles leading up to the start of the 3rd Act.
And there’s room here for some Crowd Design. And so, today, we’re going to engage the Power of the Poll.
First, let’s define our Goal as a Creative Team: To fill in the space of the 2nd Act with mini-adventures that allow Alice to collect The Pieces of The Champion.
The Pieces are bits of mechanical magic Hatter will use to transform the Jabberwock into a JABBERWOCK 2000 so The Queen can send him to defeat The Chaos. Right now we’ve defined The Pieces as: Heart, Brain, Eyes, Flesh.
These pieces are strewn around Wonderland as a result of the explosion that blew apart Hatter’s Workshop (and his Domain in general). Which is why Hatter’s Domain looks like this when we visit it:
Hatter sends Alice off to collect The Pieces of the Champion. And she travels around Wonderland (likely) using the Hall of Doors:
Now… where does she go? Where does she find The Pieces?
My sense is that The Pieces of The Champion and their location will contain a subtextual message with regards to Alice’s psyche, emotions, etc. As in, “The Eyes represent the window to the soul; we find the eyes in a realm full of windows and mirrors; the eyes are in Looking Glass Land.” (that’s just nonsense brainstorming, but you get the idea).
Btw, we can always come up with more/different Pieces if we feel it’s necessary (or helpful in creating narrative links to interesting locations).
So the question is… WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO? What parts of Wonderland shall we explore? Do you want to revisit a favorite location from previous games (I really like the Vale of Tears)? Or do you want to build a place that’s mentioned in the books but we’ve never seen in-game? Or can you imagine some dark corner of Alice’s psyche that we’ve never explored? Maybe that place where we find all her memories from when she was a baby?
The Poll contains a list of some places we thought might be interesting to explore.
Have other ideas? Select “Other” and let us know in the comments.
NO idea how this Poll thing works on Patreon. I think you can select more than one option… but try to limit your selections to 1~3. Would be nice to get at least one Clear Winner out of this. I mean, it’s the least we all deserve these days!
From Shanghai with Love,
-American