Alice is the protagonist of Electric Hearts. This is one of her early design concepts back in 2013.
In earlier iterations, Alice’s nature was undecided. She was sometimes a human girl, and sometimes a human turned robot. In this iteration, her character was finally settled as human’s first robot with true artificial intelligence.
In the early iterations of Electric Hearts, most characters are anthropomorphic animal robots. To bridge the audience with the fictional world, I purposefully designed Alice to be an ordinary human girl. She behaves like a viewpoint character similar to Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — which is also where she got her first name from.
Alice’s family name is Rosetta. The name was chosen after the Rosetta Stone, a stele artifact with 3 different kinds of letters that helped to decipher the Ancient Egypt glyphs — a bridge between the past and now. Alice is also supposed to be a bridge between the past and the future in Electric Hearts’ story.
Many of Alice’s key design elements first appeared in this iteration. Namely, the black hair, the cat ears and tail, the Chinese style costume, and the wing-like skirt. They look stiff in this version, but clear enough to represent the ideas. Later iterations would turn these ideas into a more elegant design.
Alice is a white face cat here. I don’t remember the exact reason for this decision, but I guess it was an attempt to cover up bad human anatomy. Alice’s eyes are way too big here, and her facial structure looks off. Without the cat ears and tail, her design could look even worse.
Although not very gracefully done, this iteration of Alice’s design was nevertheless very important. Most of her current design elements were first introduced in this iteration, and she had become an interesting character with her new settings. Alice would later replace Cloud White as Electric Hearts’ protagonist.
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