Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 3

Battles

Combat is presented in third-person. Clerval leads his squad of monsters around the battlefield and can have a decisive personal effect on the outcome. Other friendly units behave autonomously according to the tactics selected before the battle.

The play can zoom out to a map showing the whole battlefield, and can see where friendly officers are in trouble. The player will need to direct his squad to address problem areas in order to achieve victory.

Solo missions

Solo missions take place in a variety of locations: Highgate Cemetery, the Limehouse Docks in London, an isolated chateau, the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Versailles Palace.

Solo missions very often involve an element of stealth. Success in the mission typically unlocks later missions and/or provides help in battles, in the form of new technology, information or special items.

For example:

• Clerval must attend a dinner-dance at the Savoy and speak with Ada Lovelace. She can help in later levels by providing decoded information from the enemy.
• A rival officer in Clerval’s regiment challenges him to a duel. If Clerval wins, he will have a greater influence over troops in subsequent battles.
• Traitors drug Clerval and abduct Lady Lovelace to ransom her to the French. In the role of one of Clerval’s monsters, the player must get her back without panicking the citizens of Mayfair.
• Clerval goes alone to meet a spy in no man’s land. However, the rendezvous turns out to be a trap and he has to escape and evade his way back to safety.

The laboratory

Between levels, you get to repair or reconfigure your monsters in the laboratory. The lab is represented as a 3D environment that you can walk around. The lab is depicted as a gothic chamber with flickering tesla coils, bubbling fluids, and lightning flaring outside as rain beats on the shutters. In glass tanks around the lab float your monsters. A superimposed screen shows body parts in storage in your vats. Success in previous level provides you with new body parts and (more rarely) with new heads.

Body parts can be removed from monsters to the vats, or taken from the vats to attach to a monster. The heads define each monster. You can change any other body part, but each head remains suspended in its tank. Sometimes you won’t have enough spare parts in to field a whole team of fully-repaired monsters. The choice then is whether to go with a small team using all your best parts, or a larger group of half-made (and so weaker) monsters.

Each head is a named individual with his own history and, while they are this dormant state, you will sometimes hear them muttering as they dream of the life they had. The life story of each head develops over the course of several levels, as snatches of memory float to the surface. For a player who chooses to follow them, these life stories – some poignant, some brutal, some darkly funny – will each have as much depth as a good short story.

Sometimes you will acquire the head of an enemy or rival – or even a friend who features in the backstory. These heads may have special knowledge such as the layout of a chateau or a secret route behind enemy lines. Listening to their stories unlocks additional scenes in the backstory – which in turn may reveal unsettling things about Clerval’s own past.

Whenever you win new technology in a level, this is where it appears along with new options associated with it. For example, acquiring Moreau Hybrids allows you to attach bats’ wings or giant eel bodies to your heads, instead of human parts.

Cinematics

The cutscenes will be used to illuminate characterization and build the backstory, rather than to provide the player with superfluous mission briefings.

Many of these sequences will be flashbacks to Clerval’s past. Others show scenes whose significance will only become clear later. The cutscenes are presented in a style of “found drama”, in which the viewer is eavesdropping on secrets of great personal importance. Not everything is immediately explained. Some events seen may be subjective or open to various interpretations. This contrasts with the more common style of “staged drama” which resembles the storytelling grammar of a traditional movie.

Examples of this style can be seen in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Guy Maddin’s Careful. When successful, the effect is to intrigue and involve the viewer by presenting fragmentary scenes that can be gradually assembled into the complete story.

The player is free to skip the cutscenes. However, they should be a rewarding viewing experience in their own right. Even players who skip right through just playing the levels may later come back and watch the cutscenes like watching the extras on a DVD.

This innovative style will add to Frankenstein’s Legions as a groundbreaking, quality entertainment product unsurpassed by any previous videogame. It is especially appropriate to the lean-forward medium of games – where the plot-based, theatrical style of cinema-influenced cutscenes can often merely seem an unwelcome interruption.

Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 2

A War Fought By Dead Men

Frankenstein’s Legions is an action-strategy game set in a gothic environment of moors, mountains and deserted villages. The style is a raw, modern take on Mary Shelley’s classic science fiction. Jittery Se7en style scratched-negative titles and icons, bleak war-torn landscapes, desaturated colors, haunting sounds of wind and rain, the howls and shrieks of reanimated men – all combine to evoke an eerie and highly original game experience.

The player takes the role of Tom Clerval, Victor Frankenstein’s godson. The game, presented throughout in third-person 3D, follows Clerval from army surgeon to high rank as officer in charge of a platoon of resurrected monsters.

Many levels consist of battles and sieges. During the action, the player controls only Clerval and his “dirty dozen” of monsters. Other characters are autonomous. However, Clerval’s orders will influence other soldiers on his side. His actions will affect their morale.

Other levels involve stealth or undercover missions, requiring the player to locate an item or person, perform an assassination, or gain information. Usually Clerval undertakes these missions alone or with just one or two of his monsters. The essential elements of stealth missions are always clearly defined – you locate the secret plans and the mission is complete. Incidental information that you discover along the way (in the form of rumors overheard from civilians, etc) can help in subsequent levels or add depth to the story, but will not be vital for completing the level.

Between levels, the player can repair and modify his monsters using body parts and new technology won during the level. He can also learn the monsters’ individual life stories – which will sometimes give a clue to special skills they can use.

Inter-level movies are not only used to give the player mission briefings, but principally as in a movie to fill out Clerval’s backstory in flashback and to show scenes that are happening to other characters.

There is additional story material in the form of each monster’s life story. The player can piece these together or ignore them as he or she chooses. After completing the game, it will be possible to go back and access all the monsters’ life stories, rather like unlocking extras on a movie DVD.

The built-in awareness of the brand will give Frankenstein’s Legions an appeal to a wide market beyond the gaming hardcore. The emphasis on story, atmosphere, a small core group of characters and simple gameplay mechanics will increase the appeal to this market.

“I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but by God they terrify me.” – the Duke of Wellington

All characters react to the player’s presence. Monsters cringe and howl as you issue them with orders. Friendly soldiers salute when you are near. Enemies glare and spit and shake their fists. Civilians avert their eyes and make the sign of the cross.

Monsters

Monsters are hulking creatures with ill-proportioned limbs. They howl in anguish at the heavens and rip each other to pieces in gory battles. When at full strength, monsters are the most powerful characters in the game. They have devastating special attacks and can hurl ordinary men around and tear them limb from limb. Each side in a battle will usually field only a half-dozen monsters.

Heroes

Heroes are stronger than ordinary men and may have special abilities. Senior officers on both sides are usually heroes. Tom Clerval himself is a hero. Others in the game include Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel), Isabel Blakeney and Citizen Auguste Blanqui. The reanimated Emperor Napoleon and Marshal Ney are also classed as heroes, although possessing many attributes of monsters also.

Soldiers

Types of soldier include: hussars, dragoons, light and heavy infantry, sappers, and artillerymen. A unit of soldiers consists of around twenty men, and there should be up to twenty units per side in large battles. Over the course of the game, soldiers become more accustomed to monsters and will not automatically panic when facing them. However, a full-force special attack by a monster is usually enough to cause a wavering band of soldiers to rout.

Civilians

Civilians are encountered both in stealth missions and (less frequently) on the battlefield. Civilians are frightened of monsters and will usually flee from them in panic, although sometimes they will band together, arm themselves with pitchforks and burning torches, and riot instead. Famous civilians in the story include Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Coleridge and George Stevenson.

A new world of gods and monsters

Following on from recent posts about Frankenstein's Legions, the game concept I developed with Martin McKenna that grew to become an entire created world and a novel, I dug out our original high concept document and I'll be posting it up in instalments over the next few days.

(The usual caveat applies: this is nothing to do with my recent Frankenstein app book, which is not a bit steampunkish and in fact is not really even a genre novel (though it is interactive). But if you do like steampunk, hop over to Martin's blog where you'll find he is still working that side of the fantasy street better than anybody.)

In the mid 1800s, scientists recover and perfect
Victor Frankenstein’s secrets of reanimation,
with disastrous consequences.

The Emperor Napoleon is brought back to life and unleashes his resurrected armies on Europe.

Rival factions battle for control amid the war-torn ruins.

Frankenstein’s Legions is a strategy-adventure game that will take the player on a journey into the heart of darkness. This is a world in which Victor Frankenstein’s discoveries have been put to terrible use by the military of the day. Dead men are hauled from the battlefield, their bodies stitched together and resurrected to fight again, regarded with fear and loathing by the living men they stand beside.

The player is Tom Clerval, an army officer in charge of a platoon of resurrected soldiers. This is a third-person action-strategy game with a fully developed story and with optional strategic depth for those players who want it.

In the course of the game, Clerval must maintain and expand his platoon, which consists of around a dozen monsters. Each monster has individual personality and customizable attributes. And each has his own unique life story, which you can find out in the course of the game.

This is not an “eye in the sky” strategy game. The player is right in the midst of the action with smoke and shrapnel and clods of earth flying all around him. Hundreds of soldiers are fighting to the death. The player controls Clerval and his platoon of monsters, and can set standing orders that friendly soldiers will recognize – for example to muster at a point or stand guard. Other characters react to the player but are not directly under his control.

The core design principles are:

• A fast-paced, thrilling, immersive game with lots of excitement. You will feel as if you are right in there in the thick of battle, not watching it dispassionately from on high.
• Gameplay depth for those who want it. Game decisions are simple but have strategic effect – whether to galvanize your monsters before a battle for extra strength, or save the electricity to heal up survivors afterwards, and so on.
• A sense of dread as in the best science fiction. One of your monsters turns to glare at you. Will he obey your orders, or rip you to pieces? Then he is gone, charging into the mist, howling, arms flailing, to attack the enemy.
• Emotional involvement evoked by having a small core team of characters, each with unique attributes, idiosyncrasies and a backstory that unfolds over the course of the game. These are characters you will care about.

A Modern Prometheus?

 “O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey. Still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life’s exclusive city.”

Extending the premise of Mary Shelley’s original novel, the game is set in an alternate 19th century in which wars are fought using Frankenstein’s technology. Armies are recycled into the field by resurrecting the dead and continually repairing them with spare body parts.

After Napoleon’s exile to St Helena following the Battle of Waterloo, severe penalties imposed on France by Britain and her allies leads to a new revolutionary Convention taking power. The Convention’s scientists discover Dr Frankenstein’s techniques and begin experimenting with bodies from the guillotine. To the Convention, this is Year Zero. Along with a rationalist revision of science and the calendar comes a willingness – even eagerness – to make full use of the Frankenstein technology in warfare.

By the mid-1800s, the war in Europe has been raging for decades and whole countries have become devastated wasteland. Trenches and barbed wire cut across churned fields of mud. Clouds of yellow gas poison the soil. It is as though the Great War has started eighty years early.

On the battlefield, surgeons employ the Frankenstein procedures to reclaim body parts from the dead and dying. Armies will fall in battle, only for the surgeons to go out at dusk collecting the undamaged parts for assembly into a new band of patchwork soldiers ready to take the field the next day. In most cases only the lowest grade of serum is used and the unfortunates tend to become progressively ragged and insane.

The cities too bear the scars of war. The slums stink of formaldehyde and there is a new and frightening underclass that causes people to lock their doors at night. Myths have grown around the revenant war veterans - that they are eaters of human flesh, that their blood is cold and does not flow, that death follows closely from their touch.

Recently the Convention sent a squad to St Helena to recover Napoleon’s corpse. They resurrected him using the best serum available to them at the time. It was a partial success. Napoleon’s body had already begun to decay and he now spends most of his time suspended in preservative oils brought from Egypt, emerging from the Versailles Palace only on rare state occasions.

From the Convention’s perspective, they have secured the greatest military mind of the age as a resource. Napoleon himself, however, has other plans.

Spark of genius

I wonder if it’s fair to blame J R R Tolkien for all the really bad fantasy? Those oriental monks rubbing shoulders with European knights. The elves in sports bras. It’s enough to drive you back to Ivanhoe. As Tolkien himself said: “Fantasy can be carried to excess. It can be ill done.”

Tolkien had a quality that his imitators don’t even see. There’s a creative unity to his work. He doesn’t keep throwing any old rubbish at you, he'll never perpetrate the incoherent text. He asks just that you accept the axioms of his world and the rest all falls into place.

To create something on the scale of the Lord of the Rings movies, involving a team of a thousand people over more than two years, is remarkable enough. To do it and maintain that cohesive vision is sheer genius. And only possible because, at the heart of the project, there was the novel itself.

It’s more than a question of having a core design document. You can’t build anything until you have a plan of what you are trying to build. Tolkien’s novel is the design document of the movies, but it’s also more than that. It lights the way for any new artistic work set in Middle Earth. It’s the creative Flame.

Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (the scriptwriters) became keepers of the Flame while they worked on transforming it for the screen. Peter Jackson took it over while directing. Throughout the project, all of his team had that Flame to refer back to.

That’s because the process of good creative design isn’t the dictatorship that some people seem to fear, with “the guy in charge” coming up with rules that everyone must slavishly follow. Nor is it a case of committee thinking, with everyone pitching ideas into the stew.

It’s more like proselytizing a religion. The designer or author is the prophet. He or she lights the Flame, is its keeper, and brings the team to it. Once you see the light, you can go off and do your own thing and the work you do will have unity with everyone else’s.

Movies like Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit - or The Amazing Spider-Man, or Star Trek - show that it’s possible for a team of a thousand creative people to share one dream. A handful of man-years to write the novel – and it lit the Flame for a two thousand man-year project. Doesn’t that sound like a bargain to you?

Frankenstein web demo

After all the recent posts about the writing of my interactive Frankenstein book app, you may like to try it out. And now you don't even need an iPad or iPhone, as development wizards Inkle have put a Frankenstein web demo up on their site. Pop over and have a conversation with Victor about what he's got in that tank - just click where you see the words "Give it a try."

This demo is the sort of thing that publishers ought to be putting up on their websites too, incidentally, not just leaving to developers. But we're only in 2012. Softly, softly.

Meanwhile, if you are iOS-enabled then you can buy the book here.

Fractures

Reality is breaking apart. Fracture lines exist in the fabric of reality and are spreading. People can be sucked out of the universe. Their lives are just erased as if they had never existed. From the darkness beyond the fault lines, other things from a time that never happened are waiting to break through into our world.

The players are cabals of wizards who operate secretly in the modern, urban environment. They alone can maintain and repair the cracks in reality. However, the various cabals are at loggerheads because the cabal that mends the final fracture will remake the world on their terms.

Any use of everyday magic widens the cracks, making damage to the local environment and the incursion of nightmare creatures more likely. Some districts of the city appear whole and normal. Other neighborhoods, where the cabals are weak, are magical Chernobyls where no one can walk in safety. Hence cabals have to organize and self-police to limit such damage. They also have to band together to compete with other cabals on a citywide scale.

* * *

Every so often you come up with a piece of an idea. You wait around for something else to join it to, and if you’re lucky that grows into a novel or a game design. Other times, those fragments just sit around as orphans.

Fractures is one of those.

Jamie and I would love to work it up into something. It’s got a modern Lovecraftian urban thing going on, and as a big fan of B.P.R.D. I find that has a strong appeal. Not that it’d look anything like B.P.R.D. when it grew up. I think of it as more Tarot teams up with Doc Strange to investigate The Killing.

We even tinkered with a script, whether for a game cutscene or a comic book we couldn’t say. But still the concept stubbornly refused to come out of its chrysalis. And there it remains, perhaps forever – or, alternatively, sudden inspiration next week might kindle a spark of existence for it. These things are rarely in the authors’ hands.

INT.   HYLEM BUILDING – DAY

The doors open and Grace gets out. She’s in a long anonymous hall which, in contrast to the lower floors, is still decorated in a sober ‘forties style.

She makes her way along the hall. The doors are dark wood with heavy round handles and frosted glass panels. Set under the glass pane on each door is a copper nameplate. They’re all blank.

Grace looks back along the hall. The elevator doors close.

She tries one of the doors. It swings open.

INT.   OFFICE IN HYLEM BUILDING – DAY (CONTINUOUS)

Grace steps into the office. It’s uncarpeted and bare except for a single desk with an old-style dial telephone.

The telephone is off the cradle. It’s emitting soft buzzing sounds that seem like speech, but distorted so as to be sibilant and hard to make out.

She approaches the phone and picks it up. For just an instant that we catch a voice talking quietly, half hidden by the heavy clunk as she picks the receiver off the desk.

Grace listens to silence on the other end of the line, punctuated by just a few random clicks.

GRACE

Hello?

She jabs at the cradle contacts.

GRACE

Who’s there? Hello. Hello.

Suddenly she hears a soft exhalation of breath on the other end of the line. Grace stiffens.

A whispering voice - icy, rasping, desolate:

VOICE (over PHONE)

We’re waiting for you.

Write choices

If you want to write your own digital gamebooks, there are a couple of authoring tools for that purpose. Varytale has a selection of interactive stories online already, and you can publish your own or submit through them. However, when it comes to the reader experience I prefer the way that Inklewriter subliminally guides the eye so that you don't keep having to reorient yourself within the text. They are both worth trying out, though, and no doubt we'll be seeing more tools like this in future.

I'm interested in the way that interactive literature (a subset of interactive fiction, which I use to mean any story that is interactive whether text-based or not) works differently on screen than on the printed page. In traditional print gamebooks, you are turning pages to read just as you would in a regular book, so there is no special compulsion to rush to the next choice - that choice is just an instruction which page to turn to next. On screen, however, there is the powerful allure of the button. There, when the choices are just between two courses of action, I find myself skimming the text in my rush to make the next choice.

What's the solution? Well, you could make the choices more interesting. Rather than read a half-page of text followed by "Do you parry or dodge?" I'd prefer several pages of text and then be faced with a choice I have to consider very carefully. Or you could embrace the speedier read, as Jamie and I did in the Fabled Lands books, in which case your book starts to look more like an old-time text adventure: "You are in the rolling hills north of Metriciens. Go north, west, east or south."

Or you could eschew plot-based decisions in favour of the kind of character-driven interactivity I used in Frankenstein. Ask a friend if they want tea or coffee and it's a snap decision, so who cares how you phrase it? But ask them about a moral choice or what they thought of a movie and you've got a discussion going.

What's interesting about ebooks generally is that they are not just books on screen, in the same way that movies aren't plays and television drama isn't cinema. A subtle difference in the reading experience can have a profound effect on the content. It remains to be seen how this will affect the interactive literature of the future.