Volume Two
Opening Documents
Mother of Frankenstein was initially conceived as a single game; economic considerations compelled us to divide it into three separate volumes (i.e., big box stores were nervous about the $130 price point). This decision meant each volume would have to stand alone, because we couldn’t count on players holding on to documents and props from previous volumes. From a practical standpoint, that may not seem like such a big deal, but from an artistic standpoint, it compromised some of our ability to create a singular, coherent experience through iteration and callback. We still dream of a game in which we could have hidden the secret climax of the game in the music envelope!
It also meant we would need to find a simple way to remind players of the story of the game thus far, which we achieved in a Start Sheet synopsis, and more importantly, bring them back into the emotion of the experience.
To that end, we decided to open Volume Two a little differently from the other volumes. Instead of beginning with another letter from Mary to Florence, we’d find one from Percy to Mary. This would allow us to divide up some of the necessary scene-setting between the two perspectives, as well as more firmly establish Percy as his own character. This would be crucial to setting up the twist at the end of the game: we needed players deeply invested in Mary and Percy’s relationship so they’d be more poised to believe she was planning to resurrect him.
Percy’s letter also introduces the primary theme of the game moving forward: maternal love. In the space between volumes, Mary has given birth and lost her first child. She is still grieving this loss when Volume Two opens, and it is in the hopes of cheering her up that Percy suggests they attend the ball at Castle Frankenstein.
It’s probably worth pausing a moment here to discuss the whole fact versus fiction question. Though the contents of the individual documents may have been fictionalized, the overall thrust of Volume One of Mother of Frankenstein is nearly all true; Mary’s education would almost certainly have included the subjects we described, and our description of her and Percy’s courtship is, wherever possible, as accurate as the known history allows us to be (right down to the apocryphal details of their first assignation at Mary’s mother’s grave). In order to fulfill our first design imperative—real world grounding—we wanted Volume One to remain firmly tied to the facts of Mary’s life.
Though Volume Two marks the beginning of the story’s slow shift from pure biography to science-fiction, when it begins, we’re still rooted in fact. Mary, Percy, and Claire did indeed flee England for a tour around the European continent, and it was on this trip that Mary first heard of Castle Frankenstein—a real place in Darmstadt, Germany—where an alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel had practiced his proto-scientific arts in the first half of the 18th century. Believe it or not, the historical Dippel publicly claimed to have discovered the elixir of life and was known to be an “avid dissector” of dead animals. Most intriguing of all, a local minister accused him of both grave robbing and carrying out experiments on cadavers.
While our Dippel goes by the name “Conrad Dippel IV,” and thus appears to be a descendant of the original, we leave open the possibility that the two men were one and the same. Perhaps our Dippel succeeded in concocting the elixir of life and is only pretending to be his own descendant. (This explains his tacit suicide in the final volume; he’s been alive for nearly 150 years and has finally had enough).
The Castle Floorplan (i.e., the 2D Jigsaw Puzzle)
The castle floorplan was by far the most difficult item to manufacture in the entire game, for reasons we never could have foreseen.
When manufacturers cut a normal jigsaw puzzle, they do so by pressing something like a giant cookie cutter through a piece of cardboard that is printed slightly larger than the finished puzzle will be (just as finished cookies are always slightly smaller than they were as a circle of cookie dough). This is to ensure that all the edge pieces have printing all the way to their edges. So long as the cookie cutter cuts within the borders of this larger image, no further precision is needed. Thus, the images on individual pieces in any finished puzzle might be offset by as much as an eighth of an inch in any direction.
The trouble was that we had a very specific plan for our puzzle. The climax of Volume Two revolves around removing some of the pieces, flipping them over, and putting them back together again in an entirely new way, revealing a new image. That meant that the pieces needed to be cut exactly where we specified so that the images on the back sides of the pieces would line up just as cleanly as those on the front.
To achieve this effect, we had to go through more than half a dozen prototypes, testing different materials, thicknesses, and cutting protocols. There was a period of time where it seemed we really might have to jettison the whole concept, which would mean finding an entirely different climactic effect with which to close out the volume. Thankfully, our manufacturing team at Longpack never gave up on finding a solution, and after more than six months of prototyping, we finally managed to achieve the effect we wanted.
But that was just the manufacturing. The design was even more time-consuming.
We knew that Volume Three of Mother of Frankenstein would be getting a 3D version of the castle, which would need to fit precisely on top of the floorplan. In order to pull this off, we created a 3D model of the entire castle at human scale. Very little of the real-life Castle Frankenstein still stands, and there isn’t much historical or archeological evidence to suggest how it might have looked in its prime. Still, great pains were taken to ensure that our castle matched its real-world analogue as closely as possible—not just the layout, but everything from the materials with which it appears to be constructed, to the manner in which that construction might have been achieved, to the overall aesthetic result.
For example, by the time Mary would have encountered the castle, it would have been nearly 600 years old and thus undergone numerous minor repairs and major renovations. We decided to reflect this history by designing the various inner buildings in a variety of architectural styles. The library is Gothic. The kitchen is Renaissance. The ballroom is Neoclassical. The orangerie would have been a relatively new invention in Mary’s day (these types of buildings became fashionable around the middle of the 17th century), so it’s the most contemporary. The stable and upper floors of the main building are frame and timber. Only the iconic tower (where we chose to place the laboratory) and the castle walls were imagined to have been original.
Once the building architecture was done, we turned to the landscape. All the flora seen on the 2D and 3D puzzles is native to the Odenwald, right down to the leaves and branches that speckle the forest floor. The stream and the chapel, however, are inventions, introduced to break up the visual monotony of the forest.
Finally, we set to work on the castle interiors. Each room of the castle represents a separate 3D model that has been furnished and decorated in a manner that is both era-appropriate and in line with the tastes of the 150-year-old Dippel. Because we wanted the floorplan to represent how the place would look the night of a well-attended soirée, we filled every room with props and details to make it feel alive and active. When that was done, we rendered top-down views of each room and embedded those images in the floorplan we’d previously rendered.
After all that was done, we could finally render out an orthographic, top-down view of the castle and surrounding forest.
Of course all that meant was that we had our image; we still had to turn it into a jigsaw puzzle. Most puzzles you would buy in a store use standard, recycled piece shapes and layouts, but we couldn’t do that for two reasons. First, because our puzzle was circular, rather than rectangular. Second, because we needed to achieve the aforementioned “flip and reassemble” effect. Achieving this meant that every tab and notch and Bezier curve of every single piece had to be painstakingly designed and traced by hand.
All in all, the design of the castle represented nearly a year’s full-time work.
The Ball Schedule
Scheduling puzzles are a venerable (some might say “hoary”) subcategory of logic games. We’re always wary of falling back on this kind of “expected” structure, so it took a lot of discussion and planning to turn this into something we could get excited about. The key came when we realized we could use the ball schedule to try something totally new in this extremely well-known “container”: we would make sure that every single square of that schedule represented a character or story beat.
As just one example, take a look at Percy’s journey over the course of the evening:
As you can see, Percy begins the night in the ballroom, where the party convenes. He then proceeds to the dining room for his scheduled repast. After that, he ends up in the courtyard. Why? Because he, Mary, and Claire are arguing, and don’t want to be overheard by the guests in the ballroom. The subject of their argument should be clear: while Mary has been grieving their lost child, Percy has begun an affair with Claire, and Percy isn’t even bothering to try and hide it (as we established in the Volume One love letters, Percy is violently anti-marriage and anti-monogamy).
After Mary storms off to the withdrawing room, where she can compose herself away from prying eyes, Percy returns to the ballroom to dance with a mysterious guest, Eleganza Düssmeister. We’ll eventually learn from her dance card that she and Percy then retire to the stables for “a figurative roll in the literal hay.” Again, Percy’s adherence to “free love” as a philosophy means he’s no more faithful to Claire than he is to Mary!
After that, it’s time for Percy’s scheduled tour of the orangerie (under his nom de plume for the evening, “The Illustrious Abracadabra”), during which Claire is setting up a little lover’s nest for the two of them in Dippel’s laboratory. He meets her there immediately afterwards for his second assignation of the night, then it’s back to the ballroom for another dance with Düssmeister (what a cad!). The night winds down with a couple of games in the billiards room, followed by a midnight glass of champagne in the dining room, where, having ascertained that Mary is nowhere to be found, he shamelessly canoodles with Claire.
Each character’s night can be tracked this way. Mary, who only came to the party to appease Percy, hides away from the festivities in the library and tends to her grief until she happens to meet the Baron von Dippel, who sparks her curious mind with talk of the research he’s been doing in his laboratory. The Baron’s night is made up mostly of his hosting duties and his conversations with Mary. Claire, knowing deep down that Percy sees her as little more than a plaything, drowns her sorrows in cake. No movement is arbitrary. Every segment tells a story.
This section of the game really owes its existence to the work of Graeme Base, specifically his seminal children’s book The Eleventh Hour. The ball schedule is our little way of paying homage to a classic—which is why we commissioned artist Liana Kangas to create a couple of paintings that would play a crucial role in bringing the party to life. (And just like in The Eleventh Hour, the puzzle requires you to pay close attention to a clock!).
The Research Journal
The research journal probably represents the apotheosis of our manic obsession with ludonarrative consonance. At once a series of discrete challenges and a single iterating process puzzle, the activities one engages with while moving through the journal have a 1:1 correspondence with Mary’s own experience studying galvanism under Baron von Dippel.
During the design process, we joked that it was the most elegant set of puzzles ever designed, with the one caveat that it wasn’t any fun.
Of course we didn’t really mean that—we find the puzzles fun!—but it was a self-deprecating way of reminding ourselves that we wanted the research journal to be a bit of a slog. After all, Mary is studying a new and complex subject under a brilliant and demanding master. Our goal was to capture not just the content of those studies, but the actual feeling of study—a process that begins with confusion, moves slowly towards understanding, and culminates in mastery. We designed the puzzles to model the mechanical realities of scientific inquiry: to solve them one must hypothesize, test, refine, and repeat!
We also wanted the research journal to feel appropriately brutal. After all, Mary and Dippel spent those few weeks chest deep in bloody, rotting animal cadavers! To that end, we sourced most of Mary’s animal sketches from real 19th-century anatomy books.
The journal begins simply, with a puzzle establishing how the Baron uses tic-tac-toe boards as a means of categorizing the animals he’s experimenting on. After that, a page of preparatory text lays out how players will begin using “solve” lines on the tic-tac-toe boards to establish which animal organs can be galvanized. Players are then treated to another small epiphany puzzle, using the tic-tac-toe lines in tandem with the organ pantry to spell out a word. (Another miniature epiphany puzzle introduces Ludwig the bird and calls back to the Music puzzle in Volume One. If you didn’t notice, a reminder of the rules of rhythmic notation is hidden in Eleganza Düssmeister’s dance card!).
From here, players engage in three increasingly difficult puzzles, each utilizing the same basic mechanic—combining partial tic-tac-toe boards to create solve lines and galvanize individual organs—but growing more complex as they go. The first of these puzzles requires finding the correct letter combinations to create two specific solve lines. The second puzzle tasks players with using the letter boards to discover which two solve lines can be created. The third and final puzzle requires players to take stock of all the organs in the pantry—revealing how that seemingly “off-topic” epiphany puzzle relates to the overall iterative process puzzle—and use them to build partial boards which can then be combined to create no fewer than five solve lines.
At first glance, this final challenge appears to be pretty brutal—a time-intensive process puzzle that’s just a more complex variation on a theme that’s already been “played out” by this stage. But this *sigh-here-we-go-again* energy is precisely what we hoped to evoke. Per the third directive (are you sick of hearing us talk about ludonarrative consonance yet?), we wanted to make players feel exactly what Mary would be feeling—to mirror both the rote, repetitive effort and the broad organizational skill required of the scientific researcher. What many players don’t realize is that the true challenge of the final puzzle is finding the most efficient way to solve it. If one takes a moment to inventory and organize all the information at hand, it can be solved in under ten minutes; if one barrels into it haphazardly, it can eat up close to an hour.
Of course, just as with the ball schedule, the real challenge in designing the research journal came in making sure those lovely puzzles always operated in lockstep with the narrative. The challenges don’t just grow in complexity because that’s what makes puzzle gameplay satisfying: they are paralleling Mary’s growth as a scientist. More than that, both the thematic (Death! Rebirth! Love!) and mechanical (Resurrection is possible! Mary is learning how to do it!) groundwork is being laid for the action of Volume Three.
At the point in the story where the research journal begins, Mary is still grieving both her child and her perfect image of what her marriage might have been. She is desperate for both distraction and someone else’s attention (since Percy is newly infatuated with Claire). Thus is she primed to fall under the spell of a charismatic new man, particularly one who happens to be falling in love with her. In a way, she’s the one who is resurrected, brought back to life in the only way Mary Shelley ever could be: by engaging with a fresh intellectual challenge.
The puzzles of the journal also provide a subtle development that culminates in the big reveal of Volume Two: that Dippel is hoping to apply his technique to a human being. Note that the galvanized subjects proceed from a dog Mary didn’t know to a bird she saw outside her window every morning to a chimpanzee, which is of course a primate about the size of a six-year-old child. We can forgive Mary for not seeing the writing on the wall before she finds the human heart in Dippel’s pantry—she’s got a lot on her mind—but the player is likely to sense the arc of Dippel’s sinister intentions even before discovering the human heart.
Conclusion
Volume Two ends with a neat parallel to its opening. Where we were greeted with two letters at the beginning of the volume (one from Percy to Mary and one from Mary to Florence), so do we find two letters in the Solution envelope, one from Mary to Florence and, within it, one from Dippel to Mary. In keeping with the theme of the volume, both of these “extra” documents are love letters. Dippel’s however, is laced with irony. For even as he confesses his love for Mary, he’s bemoaning his failure to successfully galvanize a single living creature, blaming some “missing ingredient” he cannot name.
That missing ingredient is, of course, love—manifested in its symbolic form near the end of Volume Three: an enormous glow-in-the-dark heart. It’s no coincidence that this is the very organ, resting still and unbeating in a jar on a pantry shelf, that inspires Mary to flee the castle and return to Percy.