Duel your greatest rival to win back your honor—or spark a revolution! It’s a tournament of steel, strategy, sabotage, or forbidden magic, in a fantasy world inspired by the Silk Road.

Games of the Monarch’s Eye is a 238,000-word interactive “silk and sorcery” fantasy novel by Saffron Kuo. I sat down with Saffron to talk about their game and experience writing in ChoiceScript.

Games of the Monarch’s Eye releases this Thursday, August 14th. You can play the first three chapters today, for free!

This is your first time writing interactive fiction with Choice of Games, tell me a little about your interest in ChoiceScript style IF.

I was a 90s kid, so I was raised on a steady diet of video games and books, including choose your own adventure books. The branching and role playing in video games is always fun, but there is something really nostalgic and special for me in a text only medium, where the reader can become a co-creator of the experience. I always loved Choice of Games’ way of putting it: ‘fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.’

What did you find most surprising about the writing process?

Managing all of the choices and stats was a handful, particularly as a first time interactive fiction writer. I’ve done some light coding elsewhere, which I was thankful for. I am also extremely grateful to my editor, Rebecca Slitt, for always helping me stay on track narratively. So many cliffs I faced. So many cliffs I stepped away from. Choice of Games encourages a lot of very intentional design to keep the work as a whole from getting too unwieldy. It would be possible to create a web so vast that a writer could never resolve half of the plotlines. However what surprised me most was the range of end results possible within this framework. Players can have vastly different experiences within this one universe, and that is really cool. It’s something I didn’t quite appreciate the scale of until I finished writing a game myself.

Who was your favorite NPC to write?

I have affection for everyone in this game, which I’m sure every author says. But, cracking Casiola’s shell as I was writing him/them/her was very fulfilling. While the player will control the depth of that relationship, and how much teasing he/they/she must endure, the long history between characters is an opportunity for peak yearning.

What inspired the setting and what influenced your work in this kind of fantasy genre?

When I started fleshing out the details of the Games and each round of the tournament, I was simultaneously thinking about the Silk Road. I became fixated on what our Westernized extractive narrative around it might have looked like with no Marco Polo main character syndrome. Those who lived on these actual historical trade routes had a very different view, of course. However, as I’m Chinese American, this definitely maintains a Western (and probably USian) lens in many ways.

The Game structure defined the acts, and the city structure led me to making the road itself the city, a series of outposts. Citizens would travel from outpost to outpost regularly. Each one could have its own customs while maintaining a larger Varzian culture. These two concepts melded into a traveling competition, where instead of hosting the Games in one city, each act would take place in a different outpost.

I stumbled on the double entendre of fortune (from the stars and fate; in your coin purse). Combined with the undertone of trade in this world, the two factions, the Merchants and Artisans, emerged quickly thereafter.

This was definitely a fun exercise of mixing and ‘using the elements you have’ in regards to worldbuilding.

Do you have some IF or text-based games you love that you’d want to share with our readers?

I have a deep affection for Harris Powell Smith’s Noblesse Oblige, part of the “Crème de la Crème” series. I enjoyed the first game, of course. Something about a drafty gothic house story with scowling love interests absolutely harpoons my interest, though. I’ve also just downloaded Stewart C. Baker’s Spire, Surge, and Sea and I’m eager to dig into that when life slows down a bit.

What are you working on next?

It’s been an unexpectedly busy summer, so I am trying to get my life back in order and prioritize reading for fun again. I have a few small narrative game ideas cooking (like a pedometer based story! and some solo TTRPGs, perhaps). It’s hard to stay away from longform, though, so I’m sure I will start dreaming up another IF work soon.