Next release should be out within a week, and it’s a big milestone with actual turnbased combat and some features from my wishlist. In the meantime, here’s a post about cultural influences and considerations in Synthnostate.

Foremost is RPG culture. I’m pretty oldschool: I grew up with 80s-90s games like Ultima, M&M, EOTB, Wizardry, XCOM, Starflight, and Star Control. Those games have aged, but given a choice I prefer tight mechanics and limited art over modern productions with whole teams of artists, writers, and voice actors. I’m against walls of text as a rule, which I may break from time to time for comedic effect. I think indie devs who expect you to grind away for 100 hours on their games are full of themselves. But games should be difficult, especially turnbased RPGs - casuals don’t really play this stuff. I have some opinions on online RPG “communities”: the Net is pure canceraids, the Watch is sus, the Site is alright, Codexia über alles.

Then there’s genre. I would call Synthnostate a heavy metal sci-fi RPG - the culture of fire, explosions, death machines, unbridled masculinity, hot chicks, and if it wasn’t hard sci-fi there would also be skeletons and dragons in it. This isn’t a medieval swords-and-sorcery RPG with spells reskinned as fantastical technology. Instead it has a sophisticated turnbased gunplay system. It’s sci-fi to the core, but not in your face.

Wokeness is a very secondary hot-button issue. I’m making this game for adult/teenage GAMERS, not young children or no-fun-allowed blowhards. Some of the content is bound to offend some people on both ends of the spectrum. I don’t care. I’m not holding back… much. However, one does not spend 5 years making a serious RPG only to ruin it with “anti-woke” gimmickry. To avoid that pitfall I deliberately chose a timeline slightly before wokeness went nuclear. Even then, the culture war is relevant to the setting and plot; I merely strive to tone it down so as not to distract from the alien shadow government conspiracies and gratuitous violence.

“No politics in video games” is easy to say in regard to arcade and puzzle games; they’re apolitical by nature. All developers have to do is simply resist the temptation to inject their personal politics du jour into their work. However, RPGs invariably reflect the worldview of their creators, and customers deserve to know where developers stand. I take a hard line against the New/Current World Order, “the greater good”, political correctness, manipulative narratives, censorship for adults, etc - and that’s certainly reflected in Synthnostate. The best I can do to keep politics out of it is to more-or-less fictionalize the various factions (and no, they’re not stand-ins for any real-world people, with a few obvious exceptions like “Twattle” the Silicon Valley unicorp).