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

Work Done

This was a week focused on cleaning things up and I started with some minor tech reshuffling. This had me extend my DSL for ECS to support marking certain component definitions as conditional. This reduces the amount of boilerplate in the entity definitions. My DSL has been getting leaner and leaner over the years and I’m quite happy with how it feels to work with. I just also wanted to note how nice it is to be able to modify it when I want to.

Most of the cleaning up was visual however. I made the tiles look nicer and made the information about their yields icon-based instead of textual. This makes the whole map look much less busy and more immediately comprehensible. It’s now much, much easier to understand the effect of the environment.

Besides that, I added a number of other small iterations to the UI. I’m going to need to spend more time playing with all of this to fully figure out how I feel, but the past couple of weeks have unquestionably reduced the friction of the game.

For the next week, I’m going to try to resolve some of the extant issues with the eXploration phase. I want to consolidate both that and the eXpansion phase by the end of the month so that I can spend some time with the later half of the game. I feel like it’s time for the game to expand a little vertically and not just horizontally.

Interesting Fact

I read an excellent quote on the impact of Gandhi on Indian nationalism last week. Ravinder Kumar called nationalism before Gandhi “A movement representing the classes” as opposed to the masses. Extremism was focused in Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab at the beginning of the 20th Century, but it took the pluralism of Gandhi and the focus on the masses that he brought in for the movement to really expand. The flip side of this though was that many groups didn’t agree with his philosophies, but took him for their figurehead anyway and so ended up doing things in his name that he abhorred such as the Chauri Chaura incident that resulted in the end of the Non-Cooperation movement.