Humanity’s last haven stands in a cursed sea: will you defend or overthrow it? Be warned: vanquished gods and spirits watch your every move. Spire, Surge, and Sea is an interactive post-apocalyptic science fantasy novel by Nebula finalist Stewart C Baker. I sat down with Stewart to talk about his work and his varied experiences writing interactive fiction. Spire, Surge, and Sea releases next Thursday, July 31st. You can play the first three chapters for free, today, and wishlist it on Steam!

This is your second game with COG after the incredible and hilarious The Bread Must Rise. What if anything has changed in your approach to writing interactive fiction with ChoiceScript between these two games?

The Bread Must Rise taught me a lot about writing in ChoiceScript, and I felt a lot more comfortable diving in this time around. I had a much better sense of where I was going to get myself stuck by making certain narrative choices and—although I didn’t always avoid those choices—the game felt much less overwhelming as a result.

Spire, Surge, and Sea is simpler than The Bread Must Rise in some ways (because it doesn’t have those cooking contest scenes, which were a bit of a nightmare to code). In other ways, I think it’s more complex (why did I think it was a good idea to let gameplay affect which NPCs are present in some scenes? Why?!).

These are kind of vague answers, so maybe what I’m saying is “I still have no real idea what I’m doing.”

One thing I’ve confirmed is that I’m terrible at sticking to outlines. Both games looked pretty different by the end than they did at the start!

Also, I greatly benefited by exploring the code of other Choice of Games titles, especially Harris Powell-Smith’s. Their work is always fantastic, and I saved myself a lot of time and hassle by exploring how they set up variables for stat increase amounts and test value amounts at the start of the game, rather than typing in a numeric value every single time!

Where do these two insanely different settings and worlds and tones come from in your fevered brain?

There is chiefly one person you can thank for this (or, if you’d rather, one person you can blame): Terry Pratchett.

More seriously, it may seem weird that I could go from zany comedy to atmospheric and slightly depressing science fantasy, but a lot of the books, games, anime and movies I enjoy the most also mix the sad with the surreal.

I read a lot of British SFF as a child (I was born in the UK), especially Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams but also lesser-known (in the US) authors like Tom Holt. And, when I was slightly older, I watched classics like Monty Python and Red Dwarf. I also got into anime and manga in my teens, and that grew into a broader interest in Japanese language, culture, and history while I was in college, including Japanese literature (classical and modern) and fiction, haiku, Zen Buddhism, and so on. And then in graduate school, I focused on medieval English poetry, especially the work of Geoffrey Chaucer.

I am a bit of a nerd, in case that wasn’t clear.

Anyway, something all of these different things tend to do is mix absolutely hilarious, surreal comedy with things that are deeply messed up and upsetting. Sometimes, the upsetting things are played for laughs. Sometimes the comedy is there to make the upsetting things catch you off guard. But often the two different tonalities just coexist, side by side, serving to highlight both the absurdity of life and our ambitions, and how tenuous and transient both of those things are in the end.

Woomph. This answer started with a joke and then suddenly got dark, huh? But that mixture of darkness and light, that brevity and our desire to overcome it, is what makes life so precious. It’s what makes us human.

Terry Pratchett is perhaps the most accessible example.

One of his most memorable characters from Discworld is Death. Literally Death—cowl and scythe and everything. Death’s struggles to understand human nature are hilarious, but they’re also compelling. And Death appears in nearly every novel, because people die and it’s his job to go collect their souls and show them on to their afterlives. (As the intro to A Death in Hyperspace notes: people die all the time.)

Those scenes with Death stick with you. They may be surrounded by jokes and puns—and many times contain jokes and puns in their own right—and they may be short, but they aren’t, themselves, jokes. Even when the character who has died is minor, or really only exists in the book to have been killed, their death is treated sincerely, their afterlife given a weight and a sort of transcendent beauty. (Or, in some cases, we get grim satisfaction by seeing them get what they deserve.)

Murderbot is another great example of this. Although people talk up how relatable Murderbot is as a character, it’s not solely its obsession with media and desire to be left alone that makes the series work. It’s the mix of tragedy and comedy, and how they both play an important part in Murderbot’s struggles to understand what it means to be human—and its difficulty accepting itself as a person.

Anyway, TLDR: I don’t think it’s weird to mix things that are hilarious with things that are sad. I can’t really understand how not to do it, most of the time!

What do you think our readers will find most surprising about Spire, Surge, and Sea?

The mix of fantasy tropes (gods, spirits, magic) with science fiction elements (nanotechnology) is probably the game’s most unusual thing.

Science fantasy is uncommon, but I do enjoy it! If you enjoy Studio Ghibli movies like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, you might find some familiar notes in this one. My working title, for instance, was Gigantea: Age of Rot. Those movies, as well as Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish stories and novels, are the game’s main influences in terms of tone and tenor.

And maybe it’s not surprising after my previous answer, but despite the overall serious tone of Spire, Surge, and Sea, I still managed to fit in a few zany comedy bits.

This is a solo effort, but you’ve written with a writing partner and as part of a group. I’m fascinated to hear how the writing process differed for you in these different projects.

The development and writing process for The Bread Must Rise, A Death in Hyperspace, and Spire, Surge, and Sea was drastically different in each case.

In The Bread Must Rise, James and I set up weekly video meetings, pretty much from the outlining process all the way through to the day we turned in the final game. We spent a lot of time in those brainstorming, bouncing jokes and ideas off each other, working through bugs and code problems, and generally figuring out what in the hells we were doing.

All that talking made the game a lot stronger and more successful, I think, than if either of us had gone it alone. It was really a collaboration in the purest sense of the word, in that I don’t think there’s much of that game that only a single one of us wrote. We each tweaked and changed and planned pretty much all of it together!

A Death in Hyperspace, which has ten(!) co-authors, was a very different beast. I came up with the frame and concept of the piece myself, and most of the writing was done in a question-and-answer kind of format. I guided the other writers through a character creation process, with a few parameters in place, and then had them describe their character’s backstory and answer a series of questions from the point of view of Pearl, the game’s player character, who is an intelligent spaceship trying to solve a murder mystery. The other writers also wrote some of the ship’s rooms, though, and provided great insights into its mechanics and narrative throughout.

Again, what makes the game so special and interesting is the way all those different people’s perspectives have shaped it. It was a blast to work on, even though I should have been working on Spire, Surge, and Sea when I wrote it. Considering people liked it well enough for it to win a Nebula, I guess I’m not sorry about that constructive slacking off. (But don’t tell Jason I said that! 😉 )

When I’m writing by myself, I’m also a lot more self-indulgent! Usually I try to keep that tamped down, but for Spire, Surge, and Sea, I let myself lean into it a bit. Probably the place that is most obvious is in the prose, which tends to be a bit more flowery and elaborate. Plus I made some minigames, which was fun!

I sometimes struggle to stay motivated and finish solo projects properly, as well. The fact that Choice of Games contracts have deadlines are a big help, but with collaborations I know other people are also invested in a project before it’s completed, so I’m more likely to follow through.

I will say that, with a game the size of a Choice of Games title, there really is no such thing as a completely solo effort. Spire, Surge, and Sea was a giant mess before beta testing. It’s really only thanks to the work of the many folks who tested it that it’s any good. So THANK YOU, beta testers! All the commentary and testing you provided, whether big or small, was immeasurably helpful.

I’d like to give a special shout out to Aletheia Knights, beta tester extraordinaire, without whom chapter 2—and the tension and clarity it brings to the world—would literally not exist. As always, her feedback made this game much, much better! I’d also like to to recognize Choice of Games forum member Mr_DeBlob for finding many bugs and making many excellent suggestions over the course of a number of playthroughs spread across about a month and a half.

You’re a heavy hitter in IF with The Bread Must Rise being a Nebula finalist for games in 2023 and your multi-authored A Death in Hyperspace winning this year’s award just a few weeks ago! Have you realized all your game-writing ambitions yet or what new styles and genres do you think you’ll be taking on next?

I’m proud of the recognition those games have received, but struggle to conceive of myself as any kind of hitter!

To be honest, I think the collaborative aspect of both those games is what makes them shine. I’d love to work on more multi-author games in the future—it’s always exciting to see multiple perspectives combine and shift, and what comes out in the end is always the better for it.

Outside of that, I’ve been interested in trying out games that aren’t just completely text. A Death in Hyperspace takes the first tentative steps towards that, with music and a few very small graphical elements. I’d love to learn Unity or Godot or some other game engine that mixes writing with graphical assets, but I’m not sure I have the time!

One thing I’d really like to do is write a game that makes it to game consoles one way or the other. Maybe some day. 🙂

What non-game writing work would you like our readers to know about?

If you enjoy Spire, Surge, and Sea, you might enjoy my short story collection The Butterfly Disjunct. It’s a collection of science fiction stories, and while some of them are funny and some of them are sad, the emphasis in all of them is really on the characters. That’s available in print and ebook from various retailers and directly from the publisher, Interstellar Flight Press.

If you’d like to keep up with what I’m doing next and what I’ve been reading or playing lately, you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter. I try to keep the self-promotion to a minimum, so usually it’s me sharing things I’ve enjoyed or diving into interesting topics.

In terms of other people’s work, I’ve been tearing through Victoria Goddard’s Lays of the Hearth Fire series. They’re lovely and engrossing, if quite long! And if you’re into space opera, you’ll enjoy The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa and The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei. Both have memorable settings, tense plots, and great characters.

Do you have a favorite IF you want to encourage folks to play?

Generally speaking, I find myself drawn to games that take chances or do something unusual as well as having solid writing.

On the book-length Choice of Games front, I really enjoyed Natalia Theodoridou’s meta horror game Restore, Reflect, Retry. It’s got a wonderfully creepy voice and plays with one of my favourite tropes: the dissonance between the player and the player character. Plus, it’s got lots of fantastic storytelling even without that.

Slay the Princess is another game I’ve played recently that explores that trope. It’s a visual novel, so maybe not IF strictly speaking, but I think anyone who enjoys strange and twisty games will love it.

(Both of these games were also Nebula finalists this year, by the way!)

Naca Rat’s Teahouse of the Gods is another of my COG favourites. I was really impressed by how it takes the “design your character” mechanic common in a lot of COG titles and turns it into something that genuinely impacts how the characters of the game interact with you—and vice versa. Plus, anyone who enjoyed The Bread Must Rise will appreciate its somewhat unconventional approach to romantic interests!

On the shorter front, I tend to enjoy weird Twine games rather than parser based pieces. Again, it’s probably that preference for the unusual and experimental! (Also, to be honest, I am awful at solving puzzles…)

Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy takes ten seconds to play but sticks with you much longer.

Zoinks! by Elizabeth Smyth is less experimental, but it’s a lot of fun.

I do enjoy Ryan Veeder’s hilarious Castle Balderstone games. They’re parser-based, but super weird, hilarious (worth saying twice), and not too difficult.

That said, I have a soft spot for great characterization as well.

Brendan Patrick Hennessy’s series of IF about Bell Parks (child detective and, eventually, grown-up detective) is charming through and through—and also often hilarious.