Eternal Affairs

Recover a stolen artifact and lose your heart as a secret magical agent! Can you uncover an arcane conspiracy before the clock runs out? After you lost your beloved brother in a magical anomaly, you joined the Bureau of Magic to investigate magical anomalies and prevent the same tragedy from befalling anyone else. Eternal Affairs is an interactive urban fantasy romance novel by Jamie Maurer. I sat down with Jamie to talk about their writing process and inspirations. Eternal Affairs releases this Thursday, June 26th. You can play the first three chapters today for free and wishlist the game on Steam!

This is your first time writing for Heart’s Choice but not your first time writing interactive fiction, I think. Tell me a little about your background with IF.

I’ve worked with several different interactive fiction games on mobile platforms. I started out adapting romance novels into an interactive visual novel format, and I later wrote some original content for the platform Storyloom (sadly no longer available). More recently, I wrote several chapters of an original story called Once Upon a Scheme on the platform Dorian.

How does ChoiceScript and our game design style compare for you to the other tools and places you’ve worked on projects?

There’s definitely a learning curve with ChoiceScript, but that complexity also gave me a lot more freedom and control over the types of mechanics I could implement compared to other platforms I’ve worked with.

What surprised you most about the writing of Eternal Affairs?

This was by far my most ambitious game writing project and it required a lot of trial and error. It also came about during a really tumultuous period of my personal life, which was a very interesting time to be writing a romance novel! I found that one of the best ways to maintain my own writing momentum and that of the story’s pacing was to imagine playing a tabletop roleplaying game with myself, where I was both the game master and the player.

Do you have a favorite NPC?

Charlie has sort of a vampy femme fatale quality to their romantic dialogue that was a lot of fun to play with. I also enjoyed writing Moth and the stream-of-consciousness poeticness that many of the Fae characters speak with.

It’s quite an interesting magical world you’ve created in this game. What sources of inspiration did you have in writing this?

Men in Black, The X-Files, and the video game Control were definitely major influences for the basic premise. The book and TV series The Magicians helped inspire the concept of a hidden magical world influenced by modern politics and socioeconomics. The aesthetic of the Fae world was very much inspired by vaporwave artwork and the paintings of Patrick Nagel. I also once worked for a company that did custom printed products, which, weirdly enough, kind of inspired my game’s CMYK-based magic system.

What are you working on next/what else are you working on now?

I’ve been on an extended hiatus from my YouTube channel about queer media and culture, but I’m looking to get back into creating more videos very soon!