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

Work Done

This week started with a simple, but important, task. I finally fixed the saving in the game and made it so that the game autoloads from wherever I left off when I open it. I spend a lot of time playing my game incidentally while working on putting in new features and fixing bugs and the like and by autoloading like this, I’ll see more than just the first dozen turns while doing so. This way, the rest of the game will get some attention too and not just the opening. This also helps me understand the way the game plays in the more advanced stages of the campaign. There was a fair amount of additional tech debt and some number of bugs to resolve and this week brought the game back to stability.

I made the distinction between the systems of learning about the other players and of researching for the group report sharper. I changed the presentation of learning about other people so that players now are told much less about what they are researching will do. I need to restructure the tech tree to make that even stronger now. I want the player to never be exactly sure of what they are going to get. It’s unquestionably going to cause a little frustration for players, but I think that the uncertainity will be fun too and I think the storytelling is critical. I also changed the currencies such that working on the report and working on yourself are different currencies. Having production essentially count twice felt weird and so I needed to change it, even if I had no philosophical opposition to it.

Besides that, I made some minor additions to temples and national parks and extended the reach of the quest system a little as well. I also made the whole thing a little clearer and surfaced what was going on a little better. I still need to spend more time playing it and seeing how it feels though.

Interesting Fact

I started reading The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore a short while ago and it’s a very new, very powerful feeling for me to see a main character with the same name that I have. I actually strongly identify with the Nikhil of the book. His are the actions that I would take. I’m 28 and this is the first time that I’ve ever felt this way when reading a book. Incidentally, separate from any quirks of naming, it’s a really good book and surprisingly topical over a hundred years after its publication.