If you're interested in the process that's going into writing Black Prophecy, why not go to the author himself? That's exactly what Colony of Gamers did. The site recently conducted an interview with Michael Marrack, a German sci-fi author and illlustrator who is writing the space action MMO, and they discussed everything from the game's plot to the differences between writing for games and writing prose.

Before Marrak even started working on the missions, he "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." He said there's about 700 pages of manuscript material, with 300 pages focusing on missions. He's even been involved with the art direction for the game from the very beginning.

Despite all this detail, Marrak does acknowledge players won't need to be familiar with the game's background to play. However, he did say "it will definitely be enriching to pay attention to the overall context and to keep this in mind if you are interested in the whole picture."