Creating Bedlam with Christopher Brookmyre

A game that mimics the shooters and action games we grew up on and loved during the 80s and 90s. A game penned by Scotish author Christopher Brookmyre. A game that just recently made it out of Early Access and onto Steam as a full release. We're talking about Bedlam - developed by Brighton-based Redbedlam. We recently had a chat with Christopher Brookmyre about his interest in gaming and how this project came to be.

"It all begins with games. I grew up playing games on a ZX Spectrum and then got into PC games when I was a bit older. And I put a lot of game references in my books. In particular two books, a book called A Big Boy did it and Ran Away and another one called Pandaemonium. And the game developers at RedBedlam had read these books and they realise that I must be quite a keen gamer with a particular interest in FPS. And they asked if I would be interested working with them to develop a new FPS. And we had this big, long meeting and realised that we'd all had this same experience of growing up playing games from the arcade games of the 80s to more modern games.

"I came up with this idea that it would be great if we could create a game that reflected how games had evolved. And I came up with the notion of someone being transported into a world of a video game. That kind of thing has been done lots of times, but my twist on it was 'what if you found yourself in a fancy world of a video game, but you're not the hero?' and you suddenly realise you're one of the grunts who's supposed to get mown down by the hero in the first level. And it grew from there. I realised that if I could come up with an idea where someone was able to transport themselves from game to game, this would give us great potential. And I outlined the idea for the game and realised I was outlining the story for a novel as well. So I thought I'll write it as a novel first and that way I'll be able to discover the characters and come up with a good philosophical concept to underpin the whole story. And so the novel was published in 2013, which helped the developers get finance for the game. Because it's much easier to make a financier understand your concept if they can go read a novel rather than just read some sort of game proposal."

How does creating the story for a video game compare to 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."

"I think it's exciting for a player to feel they're working out a story on their own, due to their own actions rather than having it spelled out to them. And that's really different from writing a novel, because in writing a novel you are in complete control of what the reader knows and when they know it. Whereas in a game you can't guarantee a player is going to go into the right room that you need them to or that they're going to interact with the right object."

With that in mind, how do you go about creating the main character? Is it a case of not being too heavy handed as the player needs to feel that he or she is that character to some degree?

"If a player gets too much of a sense that they're on rails or that the story has already been mapped out for them... I think that can take you out of the story. If you feel that you're already prescripted. It's a balancing act cause I think if you don't have a sense that there's a story being told, and that someone has thought it out and planned it out for you, I think you lose a bit of momentum as a player. You don't really feel that you're being controlled and manipulated. So it's always a tricky balancing act between the two."

What has it been like to see the world you imagined realised in a game?

"It's been a real school boy fantasy type thing. It's been a dream. There's a school of thought that video games are kind of bad for the imagination. That children are somehow negatively affected if they're playing video games. And actually I had completely the opposite experience. I was inspired by the games I played right through my childhood and into adulthood. So to see these places that I've dreamt up come to life has been really exciting. And really from a very early stage in the creative process, the concept artists did a sort of story board for the whole thing. And I showed it to the people at my publisher and the people were amazed how the story board looked so much like how they had envisioned the novel. And so that concept art has gone all the way through. So it's been the kind of thing you dream about when you're a kid. Dreaming up a world and then seeing it in a video game. And in my case that has been true."

"What worked for me in writing the novel was that a lot of people involved in video games or are fans of games they knew what games the novel was alluding to. So they could probably start to have very similar ideas of what those worlds were going to look like. If you describe what looks like a 90s style science fiction shooter that looks like Quake 2 or Unreal, they know what it ought to look like. Or if you talk about a fantasy RPG then everybody does have a sense of what buildings they expect to see in there, what landscape they expect to see. But what has been fascinating for me has been people who are not gamers reading the book and talking about how vividly they pictured it. Because it's probably one of the most visual books I've ever written. Because I'm able to describe these environments and sometimes environment as part of the story."

Has this project changed you as an author and novelist in any way?

"I think you're shaped as a writer by every new experience, but what was really new for me was collaborating. As a novelist I never collaborate with anybody and it was good for me to have to tell a story around physical objects, really. The level designers would tell me what they were building and I would have to come up with a story reason for the player to do certain things. Which was good discipline for me really because it's almost like a creative writing exercise where someone said you need to come up with an explanation for why a player has to go an destroy three checkpoints. You don't come up with the first thing that comes into your head, you have to make it intriguing. But what I must say by the end of the process I was quite glad to be completely in control of the next thing I was doing. Back to just having to please myself."

What's next then? Would you like to explore this subject manner (video games) further?

"The way the scheduling has worked out is that I wrote the novel back in 2012 and I wrote the script for the game maybe a year and a half ago, maybe more now. And so in the meantime I've written two more novels and I'm halfway through another novel. And I've always found that I write novels that are big and grand and that have massive scale and then I want to do something more intimate and so my novels have alternated between those two things. And so having the experience of Bedlam, writing something that was so imaginative, so massive scale and visual I've responded by writing something that was a bit more intimate and a bit more down to earth. But I've done that for a couple of books and I'm looking forward to doing something more expansive. And I'd love to work on a sequel to the game. I think the concept of the game, the idea that the integrity can take over the NPCs in any given game and turn them into enemies means that the potential is limitless. We could have sports games where suddenly you have to fight all of the players and your Guitar Hero where you've got the stadium for the fans, the fans could become your enemies. There are so many things we could do with it. And I'd love to work on a sequel."

Bedlam is currently available on Steam (£12.99 on PC/Mac) as well as PS4 and Xbox One.