Health and Damage

NOTE: These are not final and may not apply to Alice: Asylum. This is only for reference.

Health and Damage

Wonderland is a representation of Alice’s mental landscape. Here, damage = mental hurt. In Wonderland health = mental health. For the sake of simplicity it’s referred to only as “health”. Alice’s health is represented by a health bar. When Alice takes damage she will lose health, when her health bar reaches zero she will die and the game will restart at the previous checkpoint. In order to maintain her health the player must find health pickups throughout the world. Health pickups are found after defeating enemies and within small breakable objects. Alice’s health does not auto-regenerate.

Health Upgrades

• Health upgrades are collectibles found in Challenge Caves. After gaining a certain amount of Health Upgrades the

size of Alice’s health bar will increase. As Alice picks up a health upgrade the in game UI will indicate how many more health upgrade collectibles it takes for her health bar to increase.

• Once the player has collected enough Health Upgrades to increase the size of the health bar there will be visual

and sounds that indicate her health bar has increased.

Damage

• Wonderland is filled with a wide range of emotionally charged items, characters, and locations. Alice is walking

through a literal representation of her mindscape – memories, emotions, and thoughts come to life. All of these representations of “damage” can be wrapped in flashes of imagery, VO snippets from Alice’s past, etc. Items and characters which deliver damage:

• • Enemies
  • Emotional landmines (physical traps/bombs)
  • Lava/Poison/Blood

Damage Indicator

Direction of damage origin displayed by on-screen highlighting. When Alice takes damage such is indicated by the following:

• Camera movement (shake, jerk).
• SFX/VO (Alice’s vocalizations & “hit” sounds if appropriate).
• Animation (blended “jerk” animations).
• Particles (blood/”hurt”).
• Post process.

Death

Death is an inconvenience – a return to a previous location in the game, a time penalty. We will strive to make death interesting so that it doesn’t feel like it is only a penalty. Any death sequence should always be kept short, sweet, and “rewarding”.

Wonderland

If Alice sustains too much damage she’ll die. Our metaphor for it is linked to emotion: “Meltdown”. Too much emotional damage will cause Alice to lose it, breakdown, and retreat. Other metaphors to inform this event: emotionally shattered, destroyed, blowing one’s top (Alice’s head explodes?).

Death Types

Death inducing damage comes from a variety of Wonderland sources:

• Damage from Enemy
  • Several Deaths depending on Enemy
• Crushed (horizontally, vertically)
  • Model is flattened, blows away.
• Falling – into void
  • Explodes into swarm of butterflies
• Burning
  • Should be a major weakness and fear.
• Arctic Water
  • Turn into ice cube
• Level specific deaths
  • Queen’s tentacles, etc
• Shrunk death
  • Same as all other death animations.

Other gated abilities; Inhabit, Eat Me, Off with Her Head will not have specific animations as they should be used within the gated puzzle area. Note: Camera moves for these deaths should be scripted to highlight the dramatic/emotional uniqueness of each.

Re-spawn

After death comes re-spawn. Alice will be returned to the last, checkpoint. Upon re-spawn Alice will have fully restored health (100%).

• Re-spawn “event” should be themed to match with death event. Explore this in art.

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