Volume Three
Intro Documents
In our original outline for Mother of Frankenstein, we planned to create five acts, instead of the three we ended up with. One of these acts would have covered perhaps the most well-known episode of Mary’s life, the competition at Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati during which Frankenstein was conceived (and also John Polidori’s The Vampyre, universally acknowledged as the original “gentleman vampire” story). When we realized we would need to put the game on a pretty severe diet if it was ever going to fit into the metaphorical dress of our budget and be ready in time for the metaphorical prom that is a release date, this chapter of Shelley’s life was the first to go. Our story is less about Mary’s writerly talents than her relationships, and the very fact that the events of that summer are already so well-known is reason enough to elide it.
However, cutting this section introduced a problem: how would we catch players up on what happened to Mary in the years between the end of Volume Two and the beginning of Volume Three? Not only did we need to at least acknowledge the writing and publication of Frankenstein, but far more importantly, we needed to find an emotionally satisfying gloss for the deaths of Mary’s second and third child, the drowning of Percy Shelley, and of course the birth of Florence, the focus of the whole game.
We decided to transform the short story we’d promised as a kind of “bonus” in the Kickstarter campaign into an integral part of the gameplay itself. Thus, after reading the obligatory Start Sheet and a fresh letter from Mary, players are asked to read a five-chapter short story covering the “missing” years between volumes. Again, while a comparable “info dump” in another game might feel out of place, Mary is first and foremost a writer, so it makes (ludonarrative!) sense. Setting it in the voice of one of her dead children also presages the eventual “big reveal” of the game.
The 3D Puzzle
If you think about it, a 3D puzzle is actually made up of several dozen small 2D puzzles that can be individually constructed, stood up on their sides and, using alternating quarter-inch tabs, interlocked. Early on, we decided that each of these tabs would represent three feet of real-world space, which gave us a grid system that we could then use to reduce the castle to its fundamental geometric shapes. Unfortunately, the floorplan of Castle Frankenstein is hardly a simple rectangle. In fact, it’s basically shaped like a (how appropriate!) coffin—a fact which we absolutely made the most of. Still, all those funky angles (157°, 112.5°, etc.) made for some fun trigonometry.
We’ve already said a lot about how the castle was modeled in 3D, but there was plenty more work required to get that human-scaled 3D model into a form that could be manufactured and constructed as interlocking pieces of foam. As with the 2D puzzle, this is because of the unreliability inherent in puzzle cutting. In real life (and in our 3D model), walls end where they end, but in the images produced for our manufacturer, every wall had to be extended a quarter inch in each direction to ensure full image coverage on every piece. This meant providing textures for all that “extra” real estate and finding a way to make sure it didn’t pose a sightline problem when rendering out a tangent wall.
And then there was the question of lighting. The ball takes place at night, so the 2D puzzle was lit with a simple moon lamp that cast a narrow but prominent shadow (which is quite useful for assembling the wall pieces). Of course a moon lamp would never work for lighting the vertical 3D structures, as it would cast any wall facing away from the moon in shadow. We tried compensating with natural light sources (braziers, fireplaces, etc.), but diegetic light wasn’t going to get us to where we needed to be. Moreover, the events of Volume Three take place during both day and night. We needed to maintain the shadow angles present in the 2D puzzle, but find a light palette that could suggest any time of day. In the end, we ended up building bespoke virtual lighting rigs for every single wall in order to get the contrast and colors just right.
At least we had one bit of luck during the prototyping process. Early prototypes of the castle proved to be worryingly unstable; the walls were always threatening to come apart. And though we’d always planned to have ramparts atop the castle walls—after all, castles repelled invaders long long before they ever hosted balls—we’d planned to make them out of heavy card stock. Eventually we discovered that if we made them out of the same foam as the rest of the puzzle and used the tab holes we’d left in to suggest an archers’ arrow slits, the overall structural integrity of the castle was improved immensely.
The Roofs
We always knew the castle wouldn’t look complete without roofs, but we couldn’t achieve the detail we wanted with foam, so we decided to go with folded paper. (One of the few structures that remains at the site of the real Castle Frankenstein is that striking tower with its steeply pitched roof—we were hardly going to pass up to the opportunity to recreate something so iconic!).
Much like the walls, the roofs were designed first in 3D-modeling software, where they could be easily reduced to their component shapes. Once we had those shapes, we had to figure out how to flatten them while keeping as many sides contiguous as possible, thus minimizing the number of separate pieces required to construct each roof. After that, we had to design a process players could follow to assemble those pieces. The inspiration here was paper dolls and their folded tabs, though we soon learned that said tabs would need to interlock, rather than simply fold over each other.
Of course, it's one thing to “build” a theoretical foldable structure in a computer; it’s quite another to actually assemble it out of paper. Each of the eight roofs went through more than a dozen hand-cut cardstock prototypes during the design process.
Only after we had the structural and assembly designs in place could we begin texturing the roofs. All the same “misaligned cookie cutter” stuff we talked about with the 2D and 3D puzzles applies here, but it would have been next to impossible to effectively compensate for the extra geometry on structures as complex as the roofs. For this reason, the texturing was initially done on the flattened shapes, then the result was brought back into the 3D model for testing, detailing, and lighting.
When we finally received the next-to-final prototypes from our manufacturer, we were distressed to discover that the cardstock they’d printed on was (counterintuitively) more prone to tearing than our slightly thinner OfficeMax cardstock had been. We realized we would need to “audition” a wide variety of different paper stocks, compositions, and coatings to find one that was simultaneously easy to fold and difficult to tear. We also redesigned the tabs to make them as strong as possible. In the end, we’re still a little disappointed in the result; the roofs tend to tear if not handled extremely carefully.
It seems hilarious in retrospect, but when we were first outlining Volume Three, we worried there wouldn’t be enough traditional puzzling to balance out the time players would spend building the 3D puzzle and roofs. To that end, we decided to create a puzzle for each roof, one that would have to be solved in order to derive the relevant instructions.
Admittedly, these puzzles fail the test of diegesis—there’s no logical analogy between the work Mary is doing (preparing her son’s body for surgery) and unscrambling an anagram or noticing the secret symbols atop the orangerie pillars. In this case, we decided we needed to prioritize gameplay: after asking players to spend 3-5 hours building the castle, we needed to provide some pure puzzling goodness to go with the next 2-3 hours of physical labor (i.e., folding the roofs).
That isn’t to say we weren’t able to maintain some sense of ludonarrative consonance. Most of the roof puzzles do connect to the story: CAPSIZED describes the way Percy Shelley died, which would of course be in the front of Mary’s mind; three puzzles (Ballroom, Orangerie, Kitchen) ask us to engage with the physical castle, which fits with the fact that Mary is now puttering around the place alone; two puzzles (Library, Gate) send us back to the short story, which describes Mary’s current emotional preoccupations; finally, the Laboratory puzzle’s trickiest moment draws our attention to the very spot where the climax of the game will occur—the slab (where we might notice that long-ago foresworn “V”!).
The Advent Calendar
We spent a long time trying to work out a satisfying climactic puzzle track for Volume Three. In our initial vision of the game, we imagined using cool tech that would allow players to literally raise a little doll from the dead. But when we discovered the logistical hurdles to importing a game with embedded electronics, we realized we had to scale things back.
As with the riddle/ring finale from Volume One and the jigsaw puzzle flip/rebuild in Volume Two, we wanted something that moved quickly (rather than some difficult epiphany puzzle you had to stare at for minutes on end) and involved something satisfyingly physical. We thus landed on a multipart process that took the climax of Volume One and added a couple of extra steps: a riddle forces you to search around the 3D puzzle, Where’s Waldo-style, until you find a symbol. This symbol leads you to open an “advent calendar” type of door (and who doesn’t love opening little doors!), where you’re treated to a small bit of story and asked to punch out a little window illustrating that action, which you can then slot into the castle precisely where the action takes place.
We knew the big reveal of our game would be far too obvious without some kind of misdirect, so the short story was written to lead players to believe Mary had returned to Castle Frankenstein in order to attempt the resurrection of her late husband. We then left a seemingly innocuous empty space where the last piece of the narrative—which could be found behind the final Advent Calendar door—could be slotted in to deliver the twist.
For many test groups, this reveal has landed with exactly the bang we’d hoped for; for others, it’s been more of a whimper (“Wait…what happened? Wasn’t she always trying to bring Florence back to life?”). We figure it’s a bit like a game of three-card monte. Mother of Frankenstein attempts to fool players into thinking the card isn’t where they thought it was—but there are some people out there who, when faced with a garrulous huckster dexterously sliding cards across a table, simply refuse to make a bet. And who can blame them?
We can. We totally blame them. 😊