Happy New Year and welcome to 2026 spirits! The 1TK team is officially back and working hard, preparing and getting ready for the early access release on January 22nd! We have several things to discuss and update over the next few weeks as we get closer to release, but to begin, let's step back a moment to discuss Alice and her gameplay design.
Prefer to watch?
Join the team as they talk about Alice and her gameplay design in the video below:
Similar to Wukong, Alice has an abundance of lore surrounding the character that everyone knows well, meaning that when we went through the book and picked out the defining moments for her, we realised that we wanted to focus on a few core aspects, primarily that it is a dreamlike world and story with quite a few moments surrounding eating and drinking.
This inspired us to design our version of Alice as a consumable heavy hero with several sleep effects that primarily debuff her opponents and buff her own tiles. We even explored the possibility of making tiles larger or smaller with consumables, but the answer turned out to be a resounding “absolutely not” from our Design team 😅. However, we knew she naturally leans toward gameplay with risk and reward, especially since it aligns with the character's lore, so we wanted to ensure that some of her mechanics follow the same trend.
Pictured are two vastly different Alice boards, one more geared towards consumables, the other, destruction effects to simultaneously buff Alice and gain thorns.
Shop Abilities
Her first shop ability, which gives her the ability to create a little white rabbit tile, and if that tile survives a battle, you get a reward that can help potentially shape the rest of your run.
On the flip side, her second shop ability is less focused towards risk and reward, but helps you manage that risk a little better by giving you the ability to reroll the shop.
Ultimates
You also see this within her ultimates, especially her first one, which, when you trigger it, it sends 4 opponent tiles to sleep and two of her own, and these ultimates are activated by triggering enough consumables but there is a possibility that they never trigger, so, it can be a big risk and/or reward for when you achieve this.
Pictured are 4 tiles asleep on the opponent's board from Alice’s Ultimate.
The second of which is less focused on sending tiles to sleep but more about increasing the HP of your own tiles through every ultimate trigger. We’ve seen it where, using Alice’s unique tiles and abilities, players have managed to get their tiles to staggeringly high numbers at the start of combat! Though this requires getting the right tiles!
Finally, a quick nod to the sleep effect.
To tie it all together, we wanted to ensure the sleep status felt and looked just right for her. This began with the idea of making the tiles flip when they “sleep”. On a 2D image, this was a challenge but also great fun. Especially with a little Zzzzz effect coming from them while they are flipped.
That’s all for now - thank you all again for being here - we think you folks are going to enjoy some of the upcoming announcements we have!
Thank you again for following us on this journey so far! Be sure to follow and join our social channels for more info:
Stay spooky and safe.
~ The 1TK Team.