At this year's Developers Conference in Brighton, I was lucky enough to catch up with Edward Stern - Lead Writer at Splash Damage - who was responsible for having a hand in the development of Brink as well a number of titles that are owned by iD Software. He was kind enough to spend the afternoon talking about his career, including his present role at Splash Damage, and also took the opportunity to tell me as to why he thought the studio had grown up since its days as an amateur mod-team developer.
Can you tell me as to what your role is and what it entails at Splash Damage?
I'm the Lead Writer over there, so I'm responsible for the conceptualizing, back-story, dialogue, cinematics... all that sort of stuff.
Which I guess isn't that dissimilar from being a Lead Designer...
Kind of. It's like being a “Narrative Designer”, which is one way of looking at it. But it's not as directly involved in gameplay and “here's what the player's going to be doing”. It's much more from the point of view of what the player's experience is going to be. What do you want them to feel at any one point in time? Some of this is going to be done through the environment, some through the music... So it's not just the lines that actors say, and it's ...