Research magic that probably won’t destroy the world! Plus, if you do have to save the world, that’ll look great when you’re up for tenure. Professor of Magical Studies is a 500,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Stephen Granade. I sat down with Stephen to talk about the genesis of this game, and some of the surprises of writing a long Choice of Games title. Professor of Magical Studies releases this Thursday, Dec 8th.

You can play the first few chapters now for free. 

You’re a special author for me for a lot of reasons, but one is: unlike most of my authors, you and I have met in person! A few times now! How did this game come about?

I had a chance to talk with you and Jason Stevan Hill at the Nebula Conference. Jason knew me from the old interactive fiction community and had talked to me about pitching a COG game. I made polite noises but said that I wasn’t sure I had any game ideas, so of course my brain went to work and came up with several over the course of the conference weekend.

I first pitched a science fiction space shipping game only to learn that you had Fay Ikin’s excellent Asteroid Run already coming out. The other idea I was excited about grew out of a YA novel about a magic school that I wrote years ago before settling it gently in a trunk when no one was really interested in it. I liked some of its core ideas, especially its system of magic, but I wasn’t interested in focusing on what it might be like to attend a magic school. That’s when I thought, what if you were a professor instead? Academia’s something I know well thanks to my dad being a college professor and my own trip through PhD-land before I yeeted myself out of the academy. That change unlocked the game story for me, and I was so glad when y’all were excited about it, too.

At 500,000 words it is a very long game, with a lot of different paths through, and some fantastic romance options. Talk to me about how the complexity grew for you as you were writing it.

Some of the complexity was baked into my original pitch. I love games where you befriend a group of companions who help you save the day, which meant that I wanted you to have many different people to hang out with and potentially date. The game has five people you can spend time with. Creating meaty, individualized scenes for each of them added a lot of work.

I knew that would be the case when I pitched the game. What I didn’t think through, though, was what that meant for the game’s climax. My original summary of the climactic chapter ten was, essentially, “The team saves the day by being awesome.” Actually writing that, though, when you could have between one and three different companions to help you? And to make sure that they had interesting beats? And story arcs that resolved well? Phew. I remember being halfway through chapter ten when I realized that the game had grown a chapter eleven to contain it all. I took a walk outside for a while until I was calm enough to go back to writing.

What was the most surprising thing about developing a ChoiceScript game with COG style mechanics?

Figuring out stats that a player could understand and manipulate to create a character. Writing my first chapter was like wading through waist-high mud because the personality stats I chose didn’t work together. Some overlapped in confusing ways, and others were hard to incorporate in choices. Once I scrapped them and picked ones that were better separated and allowed players to better express the kind of person they were playing, the writing got so much easier.

Over the course of writing this game you developed syntax highlighting/rulesets for ChoiceScript in VSC! Tell me a little about that.

I write a lot of code in my day job, so I’m well used to editors like Visual Studio Code that provide a lot of quality-of-life benefits like automatically completing variables, warning you when your syntax is wrong, and letting you find every place you used a given variable. I’d wanted an excuse to write a VS Code language plugin, and this was a great one. Writing it forced me to learn ChoiceScript deeply. I added new features as I needed them, like reporting the word count in a game file so I knew how much I’d written.

Our beta testers and the other editors on staff were pretty wild about this game and I confess I’ve been anticipating the release as well. Looking back, what do you wish you’d done differently, if anything?

It took me three chapters to fall into a steady routine of writing, testing, tweaking my outline, and then moving forward. If I had a time machine, I’d have gone back and taught myself how to do that from the beginning!

What else are you working on? (Note: you are not required to have another project while writing a game for COG, but shockingly, many of our authors do.)

I took occasional short breaks from my game to write short stories, which I love even though they’re hard to get published and the pay is not very good! My latest one, “Wind Settles in the Bones,” just came out in the online magazine Cast of Wonders.