- A form of insanity; delusions of happiness
HABROMANIA is an offbeat, unsettlingly charming, narrative rich point-and-click game inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It follows 19-year-old, well-mannered Alice as she tumbles headfirst into Wonderland. With no memory of her past and no real allies except an enigmatic, grinning cat, Alice must outwit, outmatch, and maybe even befriend the mildly psychotic people and creatures she encounters as she tries to return to her world - with or without going mad herself.
The player character and main protaganist of HABROMANIA. Alice is a perpeturlly curious, 19 year old girl who wakes up after a long fall on a tea-table in Wonderland. She has no memory of how she got there, or much of her past at all. She’s determined to get back to her world and reclaim her memories, though that’s much, much easier said than done.
Alice’s design utilizes a lot of bell shapes. Her silhouettes are feminine but not overly defined, giving her a girlish, soft appearence with a little bit of bounce as a nod to her personality. Alice is well-mannered and yet had a youthful curiosity and determination to her that is reflected in the way she dresses and styles herself. Her hair is a dirty blonde which matches the muted, rich color scheme of the game, with a powder blue dress that represents her role as a protaganist as well as grief.
I created enviorments to showcase different characters and story moments. I animated these characters like paper dolls by seperating each feature onto their own layer and moving those one by one. This creates slightly jittery movement reminicent of stop motion, a medium that’s nostaglic, comforting, and occasionally unsettling. This fits with the mood of HABROMANIA.
Cordelia Rosewell is the bad tempered, bratty, homicidal dictator of the Red Kingdom and the biggest obstacle standing between Alice and her escape from Wonderland.
JJJ
I play a lot with the contrast between soft curves and harsh, sharp cut-off lines in her design.
She wears white, red, and black. White symbolizes purity, virtue, and is also a nod to her wedding dress and the white roses she hates so much. Red symbolizes passion, blood, and rage, and black adds some edge to it all/symbolizes mourning and death.
The Queen comes from the same world as Alice, where she was the spoiled daughter of a wealthy buisnessman . She was forced into an arranged marriage with one of her father’s buisness partners when she was only eighteen. On the first night of their honeymoon, Cordelia’s new husband tried to climb on top of her and in the struggle that ensued, Cordelia ended up killing him. To keep his beloved daughter out from prison and out of the electric chair, her father had their lawyers claim she was insane. He would go on to purchase and refurbish an asylum for the criminally insane into the sprawling, cushy Rosewell Institution for the Mentally Ill, where Cordelia could live like a princess.
But a gilded cage is still a cage, and Cordelia is not a happy camper.
She eventually meets Charlie O’Hare, a former hatter sent to the Institute after... well, he doesn’t actually remember exactly what happened. He was a bit out of it at the time, in full honesty. Unlike Cordelia, Charlie’s, like, actually crazy- he talks to people who aren’t there and is just... an odd guy, generally speaking, but they strike up a friendship anyway. It eventually turns into something more.
After four years of captivity and many, many escape attempts, Cordelia decides enough is enough and makes one final plan to leave the institute.
It does not end well.