Black Prophecy - Interview @ Colony of Gamers

Colony of Gamers did an interview with Michael Marrak, author and game designer for Black Prophecy and you can find it right here.

Immortal Machines: Judging from the timeline on the Black Prophecy website, you have created an extensive back story for this game. How much of it was for yourself to aid you in writing the actual story and how much of it is for the player?

Marrak: It’s difficult to draw a clear line there, so I have to say: both equally. To get myself mentally into the story, I write lots of texts, which I also want to communicate to the player/reader. However, in Black Prophecy there is no knowledge or educational constraint. Therefore we will have several archives the player can access if he/she is interested in learning more about the backgrounds.

The timeline was created before I had written a single line for the actual game. By playing a sci-fi game you enter an alien futuristic world and probably ask yourself: “Where the hell am I and what happened the past 500 years that renders this future so desolate?” Before I started with the actual missions I worked for weeks on things like the game’s background, the story of mankind, its expansion into space, its motivation for the creation of new human races, its fission and the resulting race wars and different technical concepts about future technology like weapons, engines, etc. This went right up to topics like string theories, non-Euclidean geometry, tesseracts and Minkowski-metrics.

In addition to this there is a considerable timeline/chronology of the alien race, though this timeline starts 200 thousand years prior to the human timeline. While you can see the human timeline as Black Prophecy’s foundation, the alien timeline builds upon it. Overall there are about 700 pages of manuscript material. 300 pages are about missions, while the rest contains the timelines, story background, research and templates for the game design.