We recently had a chat with Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre whose collaboration with developers RedBedlam recently resulted in the release of Bedlam on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Having pubilshed many books through his career, including a couple with significant gaming themes we thought it interesting to ask Brookmyre to compare what it is like writing for a video game and writing a novel.
"There are certain things that are quite similar in that a first person shooter is a very linear narrative. It would be much harder to write a sandbox open-world game compared to writing a novel. Writing a novel is kind of like describing an FPS. You're always describing how the world looks from one person's perspective. In that respect it was quite a linear narrative, that part wasn't difficult. What's more difficult is trying to find ways that allow the player to discover the story for themselves. So that it's not a series of cutscenes to tell the story. Although that is one of the areas where the finance of the game made up our minds for us. We couldn't afford to have big expensive CGI cutscenes, so we talked about how we would tell the story otherwise. And that's why the player will overhear comms between characters or discover objects and e-mails and will piece the story together for themselves."
Bedlam is out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One since last week, and you can read the full interview with Christopher Brookmyre over here.