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

Work Done

The most important thing done this week was completing the restructuring of the parameters of the game. This is a massive update to the way the game plays and needs to be tested a lot, but I’m very excited about seeing it play out. When the game was built scattershot, it allowed me to ignore a number of issues with the way it played. Now that there is something set in place, I can no longer hide from parameter issues and game flow issues. My aim is to get the game out in Early Access at the end of the month.

The game functions fairly well as a 4X at the moment, but the anti-colonial aspect is fairly subtle right now. I want to make it much more overt before I put the game into Early Access that this game is explicitly meant to challenge the core of the genre, so the primary focus of this month is getting that done. This is very exciting as there are a number of features that I’ve had planned for a while for exactly this and I think they will add a lot to the game. I’m looking for people who are interested in playing the game and not particularly interested in the anti-colonial part to playtest right now though, so ping me if that sounds like you.

I’ve finally been forced into getting a new laptop this week and while I’ve spent some time setting it up, there are still a lot of little things that aren’t quite the way that I want them to be and so fixing that will be a constant small friction for the next week. I’ve also had family issues over the previous couple of weeks, but the future looks quiet on that front.

Interesting Fact

This week, I’ve got a fun back-and-forth between Gandhi and a number of young women in Calcutta that show him moralizing at them, as was his wont, and them rather cleanly cutting apart his argument only to see him double down on his preaching.

“I have a fear that the modern girl loves to be Juliet to half a dozen Romeos. She loves adventure. My correspondent seems to represent the unusual type. The modern girl dresses not to protect herself from wind, rain and sun but to attract attention. She improves upon nature by painting herself and looking extraordinary. The non-violent way is not for such girls.” - Gandhi in 1938 in Harijan.

“Strength of character and chaste behaviour are necessary not only for modern girls but for men as well. There may be a few girls playing Juliets to a dozen Romeos. But such cases presuppose the existence of half a dozen Romeos, moving around the streets in quest of a Juliet, thereby pointing out where the proper correction lies.” - excerpt from the letter from some young women in Calcutta to Gandhi

“My correspondents do not perhaps know that I began service of India’s women in South Africa more than forty years ago when perhaps none of them were born. I hold myself to be incapable of writing anything derogatory to womanhood. My regard for the fair sex is too great to permit me to think ill of them. She is, what she has been described to be in English, the better half of mankind. And my article was written to expose students’ shame, not to advertise the frailties of girls. But in giving the diagnosis of the disease, I was bound, if I was to prescribe the right remedy, to mention all the factors which induced the disease.” - Gandhi’s final response on this topic.