Lonestar51 wrote:If I may:
How did you go about writing a sequel? From what jack wrote I guess you got a rough draft what the sequel should be. How much did you refer to the first part, and how much did you try to develop the characters and settings yourself? (And btw: how rough was the draft?) Where there some other constraints?
You may
Jack gave me a quite detailed listing of early scenes, and the first scene (Tanya at police HQ) had even been written already. (This is why the first SBF is different from the others.) The objective was to continue one of the story arcs from BH1 - namely, the "Tom, Helen and Luke run off to Mars", so the "alien plotline" from BH1 was non-canonical. This left me with two questions:
1) What would Meier want with a prototype like Tanya?
2) Why would there be a secret Mars colony?
I basically found my own answers for these questions and developed the story as such. The virus was an early idea from Jack's draft, though the original concept was to have Luke and Tanya cooperate in spreading it, and if both succeed, humanity is wiped out and our surviving protagonists leave for a new planet to start a new colony there.
I didn't quite see Luke that murderous from the get-go, so I had to make Mars the place where he is made that way, which is why the Martians became as they are, and you know how I explained their mindset in the context of the game world. Luke's part is probably the biggest piece of character development; there's a small bit going on with Tanya where she learns about her origins and comes to hate the rest of human society, but she's already well on that path in BH1.
The greatest fun was designing the supporting characters. (I especially like how Lucas Walker came out. The conversation between Meier and him is pretty much Dr. Evil from the "Austin Powers" franchise trying to put pressure on Stavro Blofeld from the "James Bond" universe - probably one of the darkest funny scenes I have written.) I tried to give everybody a distinct voice - you be the judge about how well that worked.
Other constraints - only very few. Jack allowed me to write the story I wanted to write and was apparently quite pleased with the result, even though it wasn't much of what he had originally planned. So I'll gladly work with him again if he asks me.
