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

Work Done

Lots of big fixes and playtesting this week, as with the ones before. I have to figure out how to get someone to play what’s in the game so far soon. I really dislike Zoom, but it might be the best option now. Everything seems to be stable and presentable now, but I’m just going to go over the whole thing once more next week to make sure that there’s nothing missing.

I also put in the quest system, but it isn’t communicated well yet, so it doesn’t really have anything of an impact. I made the quests into improvements on the map, which I really like, but which hasn’t really come into play yet. I’m going to try to make it clearer and see if that works. It’s a good convenience feature. It gives me a way to approach a lot of problems, but I’m not sure how good it is yet.

I started a redesign of templates as the second feature this week, but I was stymied by this lockdown. I feel that it’s best for me not to take the long walks that I’m accustomed to, but it’s hard for me to get my thoughts in order without it. I’ve got a lot in my head, but it’s very jumbled and I don’t have a replacement activity for walking to let me work things out. I tried chores like washing the dishes and mopping, but neither one really does it for me. I’m going to try just jotting things down on paper and see if that works better. I had hoped to be able to ramp up to two features a week in addition to the playtesting, but that may not be feasible while the lockdown is in place.

Interesting Fact

I’m now reading The Kingdom of God is Within You by Tolstoy. This was a foundational book for the non-violent movement and one of the principal sources of inspiration for Gandhi. In it, Tolstoy details how violence, the state and the Church are all incompatible with Christianity. For instance, he says “Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it. In the same way universal military service destroys all the benefits of the social order of life which it is employed to maintain.”