In the first part of our interview with Splash Damage designer and writer Ed Stern, he talked about the challenge of writing for games. Here, in the second, he explains how he’s planning to tell stories in Brink, Splash Damage’s forthcoming multiplayer shooter, and some of the inspirations behind its setting, a vast artificial city built on the sea.

What kinds of storytelling methods have you considered for Brink?
Well, certainly things like discoverable items cropping up. [BioShock designer] Ken Levine’s talked about three bands of player - there are the absolute completists who’ll go for the Achievement you unlock by getting absolutely everything, and then there are the guys who go, ‘Well, I think this guy got double-crossed by that guy, and I know what their names are but basically I’m here to play’. And then there’s: ‘I’ve just gotta kill this guy. I can’t remember why’. And that’s fine. Those are three totally valid ways of playing and you cannot sacrifice one of those to please the other.

Occasionally, and this is true of all art forms, the more you’re told, the less the world exists – it actually subtracts. What was thought provoking is nailed down and it drains the oxygen from the place. So to some degree we are alluding to more than we can actually show in the game, and as long as players trust the fact that we have actually worked it out and aren’t just saying: ‘Oh, it’s mysterious. It’s very mysterious. We don’t think you’ll cope with how mysterious it is. Oh, wait a minute – we’re bluffing.’

How much did you have to invent when building Brink’s venue, the Ark?
Surprisingly little in terms of infrastructure, though there was this one thing called ‘Arkoral’. Concrete and cement give off carbon dioxide as they set - this is a big problem for the construction industry. They’re actually looking for other additives, things that might sequester carbon as they solidify. Clearly, for the Ark project, they could not be making stuff out of concrete. But there’s a thing called the Seasteading Institute which is basically trying to build self-sustaining environments at sea. In fact, they’re coming at it from a kind of BioShock-esque, libertarian, Ayn Rand-style thing. I saw in their FAQ that they’ve said, ‘Yes, we have played BioShock and no, this won’t happen’.

So you’ve got to have a breakwater so it doesn’t just get washed away. You can’t make it a huge great wall so you need a concentric series of ramps and platforms you can use to generate wave energy. You’ve got kilometres of these things to break down waves in exactly the way a beach strips them away. So the interior, the inner sea, is pretty damn calm. But even with that you’ve got to have something that can bob around, so you have a single spa platform that’s got buoyancy and ballast. And we’re reading this stuff and going: ‘Fucking great! This is how it works’. And there are places in Ark where you’ll get some insight into how this place got built.

Have you considered or been asked to consider any trendy brand expansions like anime or novelisation?
We haven’t been asked, and we’ve got enough of a job getting the game out. And if it’s something you’d save for the novel, I’d be inclined to say, ‘No, put it in the game’. But wouldn’t it suck if people were saying: ‘We demand more information about this place? Please make us something we can buy!’ I think we might be able to cope with the pain of that.

Did you have a few scares when games like Mirror’s Edge and BioShock came out?
Certainly when Mirror’s Edge came out, we were kind of thinking, ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to think we’ve ripped that off.’ We were already doing all of that. I guess we were kind of relieved because [Brink’s] not just an all-white game in terms of the visuals, and the free running stuff is an element of the gameplay but it’s not the main thrust. Of course it’s annoying when you go on the fanboy forums and they’re going, ‘Oh look at them ripping this off’. And as soon as you sit down and think of it in any sort of systematic way, there really are only so many ways of making a game, so many settings you can make that will be in any way good or fun. That’s always going to be self-evident if you’re in the industry, but for gamers it’s all: ‘What? This is impinging upon my...!’ They have such an emotional connect with everything.

It’s really odd talking to design students who come up with this really dogmatic kind of, ‘Yeah, well it’s definitely a fact that this thing never works’. Well, not necessarily. The longer I do this the less doctrinaire and dogmatic I get. I honestly thing there are no rules at all; anything could be fun, we just haven’t worked out a way of doing it yet. It’s all execution.