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

Work Done

The past month has seen a lot of updates and some massive simplifications to the feature structure. Finally, all of the individual parts are beginning to dovetail and to gain some coherence. I still find that the game’s complexity is high enough that it’s hindering my ability to test how exactly things play out. This last week in particular addressed a lot of tech debt. I removed a lot of crud that had accumulated by merging some similar classes together and generalizing base classes enought to kill the derived classes. This also let me make the code that dealt with these classes more consistent, which I’m also happy about. I’ve always found reducing the size and complexity of a code base to be satisfying.

I think that I have to do a major UI pass this week, but one focused on myself. I don’t want to spend too much time on the presentation of features that I’m not confident about, but I need the game to be much clearer about what is going on so that I can understand what I’m doing. I think as part of that though, I will also just try to make it look better. There’s likely to be enough quick things that come up while I work on the transparency anyway.

A lot of this is actually also in implementing tools to reduce the cognitive load of playing the game. Being able to put down notes and mark points of interest and other quality of life improvements will make playing the game smoother and make it easier for me to see how it changes. These are all things that are likely to make it into the final version and are likely to need iteration, so getting them in place now makes a lot of sense.

Interesting Fact

The American Civil War completely disrupted the Indian economy in the 1860s. It first created a huge artificial demand for cotton and then saw that same demand collapse with the end of the war. This, combined with an already fragile economic state due to the massive changes in the agricultural system, resulted in moneylenders from outside the Deccan to come in and gain control of substantial tracts of land, converting landowners to tenants. This in turn resulted in riots across Maharashtra. This is the root of a number of stereotypes of those communities that remain prevalent today. The world was deeply interconnected at the period and I personally love reading about these unexpected second order consequences of far away actions.