I’ve been thinking a lot about apologising recently. When I was a teenager, I acted in a way I now think is pretty fucked up with a friend of mine from school. It’s been making me feel pretty guilty over the last few years, since I started thinking about it again. And I was considering reaching out to this person, who, at the time, I thought I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade, and apologising.

But I was in a bit of a confusing situation. If apologising to this person made me feel better, then surely it was an entirely selfish act? Was I only apologising to assuage my own guilt, to get forgiveness, to have someone tell me that everything was fine? And on top of that, what if my bringing it up at all brought back painful memories for the person in question, so not only was the act selfish, but it also (I hate this expression) caused harm? At the same time, maybe it’s something they’ve been carrying with them, though I like to think what I did wasn’t serious enough that they would be, all these years later - but who knew? Different things affect different people in different ways, and it may have been more serious for them than I imagined it to be, and hearing from me, me letting them know I was genuinely sorry for the way I acted, could have helped them heal.

So I did a bit of research. At first, I was convinced that not reaching out was the right thing to do. Carrying the guilt with me, feeling bad about it on a relatively frequent basis - was that my penance for having done it? Having to live with the thing I did, that makes me feel pretty shitty, suffering in my own way? It felt right to not bring it back up, to let sleeping dogs lie, and to deal with the guilt myself, alone. And this wasn’t because I was too scared to go to them and say I’m sorry - if I’d have known that it would have helped them, I would have done it in a heartbeat, however uncomfortable for me it might have been. I like to think I’ve grown in that sense, and want to do right by people.

But then (and for anyone reading this who knows me, this will come as a shock), I read about teshuva, the Jewish idea of atoning for one’s sins. In its most basic form, it consists of three parts: regretting the thing you did wrong, deciding to change that behaviour about yourself, and verbally expressing the sin itself, to the afflicted. Carrying the guilt yourself does nothing for the person wronged; from one perspective, it’s the more self-serving or -focused choice, as it remains entirely within your own head/body, despite it feeling like a penance. In Judaism, you’re expected to go to the person, and express this. And I had considered this: societally (though perhaps not for the victim themselves), the end result everyone should want is that people change their behaviour so they stop doing things which harm other people. If we strove towards that, eventually nobody would be doing anything bad any more at all. That’s surely the goal, right? And perhaps it’s important that the other person knows that you’ve changed, or are changing, your behaviour. Maybe some victims care about whether or not the perpetrator is still doing whatever it is they did to other people.

There’s a psychiatrist named Aaron Lazare who argued that apologies meet needs in the person wronged, by restoring dignity, confirming that the hurt was real, that the offender understands what they did and pledges to change. Other research shows that victims almost all of the time remember harm more intensely than perpetrators do. It makes biological sense - bad feelings sticking with us for longer helps to keep us alive, so you don’t stick your hand in the fire, so you don’t go near those bad people who insulted you, or worse. Negative emotions remaining with you into the future is a defence mechanism, disincentives for getting yourself in that situation again, if you can help it.

But anecdotally, a lot of people don’t feel this way. (I read a lot of Reddit posts). Part of the process of putting their hurt and trauma behind them seems to be coming to terms with the fact that they will never get an apology; and this seems to evolve into the feeling that an apology wouldn’t hurt, might even cause more harm by bringing up the past. Plenty of victims of which I read the opinions said they would rather have no contact with the perpetrators who wronged them, would rather they stayed away, never got in contact. Are their feelings invalid? Would they be helped by a meaningful apology and a promise of change, or evidence that change has already come, and they just don’t know it because it hasn’t happened?

In the end, it’s a personal matter. Each person might feel differently about what they want or need from the person who did something fucked up to them. In my case, while the research was interesting, it didn’t really help me figure out what I wanted to do. Thankfully, I was spared the confusion. I looked at the chats we’d had online, and realised we’d spoken on a number of occasions over the years, and that they had in some cases even been the person who had initiated contact. Once they’d even written, unprovoked, that it had been nice to catch up, meaning we’d seen each other in real life, and presumably everything had been fine. So, at least on the surface, it seemed that they weren’t plagued by the slight (which perhaps I’ve even imagined, or am remembering incorrectly), and everything is fine between us. Nonetheless, I reached out, to test the waters. Maybe I’ll be able to give an update soon.

It’s been a productive few weeks. I took last week off work, and I finished the third draft of the second act of my novel. It’s ballooned to over 95,000 words, now, so I’m sure the fourth pass will involve at least a bit of cutting; but most of what I’ve added is necessary texture. Just the third act to go, which I started on Saturday; but after four to six hours of writing every day for seven days straight, I decided I needed a break, so I’ll get back to it another time.

Because the game I was working on has the bones all in place, all I have to do now is actually write the story to get stuff going. What that means is, I haven’t done any work on it, because I’ve been trying to finish my novel. But, as a break from that, I did start creating an entirely new game! Welcome back to James’ list of neverending projects.

I’ve been playing a lot of Aurora 4x recently, which is just a simply fantastic game, developed by a single man, Steve Walmsley. Some may moan that it’s just looking over spreadsheets 90% of the time; I call it the most accurate space god simulator ever created. The depth of the game is simply staggering, and while on my current playthrough I am running out of the materials required to maintain my increasingly large armada of spaceships, I’m having a tonne of fun.

But there’s one huge problem (and a few dozen smaller ones) with this game. It was designed entirely to run on single-core processors, and in the late game, when there are aliens all over the galaxy, and you have a hundred ships, and the civilians are running mining operations in several systems, and you have ships fighting something in one place and surveying an asteroid for minerals in an entirely different place, a thirty-day turn which took fractions of a second at the beginning of the game begins to take 10, 30, even 60 seconds. Now I’m not a Zoomer, but even my attention span isn’t good enough for that, especially as there are some turns which require you to do a lot of things, but plenty of turns which are just waiting until something’s researched or built or the minerals are sufficient or whatever.

All of which to say is, I started making a clone of it using C#, in Godot, with, naturally, basically all of the actual work being done by Claude, in order to be able to play the game without having to wait what feels like half a lifetime for the next turn to come around. And it’s coming along, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very slowly. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Hilariously, the system change button broke when I was recording this video of it. I’ll have to go back and fix that at some point.

Anyway, most of my basic systems are in place. The planets are there, by system, as individual jsons; there’s also an overall galaxy.json which functions basically as a spreadsheet of all the systems. Eventually, once I’ve come up with designing ships properly like in Aurora 4x, they will be spreadsheeted too, and the game will just pull, say, engine x with laser x and hull x and then you’ll be able to build a ship, and it’ll be imported into whichever system needs it. The rest of the code, done by Claude (thanks Claude) is just six different .cs files, body, main, starsystemdata, starsystemview, and then the systemloader. Relatively simple stuff, with some real physics and maths involved so that the orbits are correct and eccentric. Luna, as you can see, is far further out from Earth than it is in real life; that’s the one concession I made for the user interface, so you could actually see the moon. Oh, and obviously I split Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri, although they’re actually one system in real life; but they’re so far away, in the game it would have been a nightmare navigating between them, so splitting them into two ‘systems’ just made more sense. Two concessions, then.

Apart from that, I plan on making the initial space drives pretty realistic - probably based on The Expanse’s Epstein drive (no relation to the bad man) - because that’s fun for me. Then, of course, I’ll make up some names for some advanced technology that lets you travel further and faster.

Now I’m at this point, the difficulty is knowing where to go next. Adding in the ship building methods is a big job, and it feels daunting right now; then there are populations, and minerals, and wealth, and the different installations you can make, and so many different things, all of which rely on interrelating systems, that it’s hard to know what to do next. But I guess that’s what design is - just making an arbitrary decision on what to build, and then hoping it doesn’t break everything else.

Some of Aurora 4x’s decisions annoy me, so I plan on changing them. For example, after you research a particular engine, you then have to design the engine, and then research the design you made. This feels annoying, because your research teams are then clogged up with designs. So I plan on having an engineering team that builds your designs, so research can remain separate and push you further into the future. Also, you can click on a ship in the list in my game, and then click anywhere on the map and the ship goes there; that functions better than the waypoint system in Aurora, at least in my opinion, at least right now. (Maybe I’ll realise later why Steve didn’t do that; designers actually make decisions based on stuff that works or doesn’t when they build games? Surely not.) And some smaller stuff, too; why do we need direct fire controls and missile fire controls? Why do I need to use resources to create MSP for maintaining my ships, when those ships could be directly maintained based on the minerals you have stockpiled, cutting out the middleman? Why can’t I land ships on planets, so they don’t sit in orbit eating up my maintenance supplies, with the trade off that they then take a bit longer to launch if they need to come to the defence of the planet? Why can’t I build missile silos on my planets so I don’t need ships in orbit defending them? Why do we have three separate sensor types, one that’s based on some sort of sonar reading or something, when in reality almost all sensing in space would be done through thermal signatures and laser painting? Why are sensors over a certain size classified as military, meaning I have to maintain ships - like explorers, for example - which definitely wouldn’t be military? So many questions, and I have the design answers for them all, if not the chops.

All of which isn’t to say I don’t like Aurora. It’s a simply brilliant game, even if the folders do like they’re from Windows Explorer in 1998. (Though, actually, I quite like that.) I just think it’s useful to critique even - perhaps especially - games you love, as well as those you dislike; besides, it’s more difficult, which makes you think more. Just like it’s useful to critique yourself, if you think you did something bad in the past. Self reflection is important.

And so’s hygiene. Remember to wash your hands.