You can read about what Syphilisation is here and the manifesto for the game here.

Work Done

This week continued my work in stability and simplification. I fixed yet more bugs and made some playtest fixes, like showing possible locations for certain build actions.

The major change was in making contiguous zones of develpoment or of preserved space into a single zone that provides benefits to every tile inside it. This is also what I expect will enable the industrialization to snowball out of the player’s control a little and so force them to spend some effort on the balance, which in turn will push them to engage with the themes of the game.

While doing this, I ended up overhauling the entire currency production system of the game in a way that is conceptually clearer than what was there before and so will be easier for the player to grasp when the communication is in place. There are still some points of weirdness that need resolution here though. I now have buildings on tiles directly affect that tile instead of affecting the host city, but there are a number of buildings which still only affect the host city as the cities start out being nomadic. Additionally, I’m tyring to have buildings function as multipliers and that becomes confusing when paired with this new system, so we’ll see what happens. I have immense faith in the ability of features to contract as I better understand them and so gain elegance, but it does take time for that to come together.

Interesting Fact

Yesterday marked 100 years since Jallianwala Bagh and I wrote quite a lot about that here. This is less of an interesting fact and more of an overview of a very important historical incident and I highly recommend that you read it as it’s something worth knowing about.