I should have announced this earlier. Here we go: I'm going to have to break my promise. The mod won't be updated with the Ixiptla system February 8. Or Feb 9. Or anywhere in February, probably.
The main reason is my overconfidence, my writing style, and the material of this update. The ixiptla system works by giving the appropriate rituals for the 18 possible god-impersonators. And naturally, the most interesting rituals need to be selected; the ones that are fun to read. Additionally they need to be gamified. Just imagine: "The Ixiptla of Tlaloc was carried to the temple hill; escorted by priests carrying scarlet banners. Do you want to use many banners for more gold but greater piety reward?" That's just dry arithmatic and not a system justifying so much writing and such a prominent place in the interface.
The most colourful rituals, the ones that made for the best stories, are however the worst to deal with. What broke this patch was Tepilhuitl, aka Huey Pachtli. The best attested ceremonies belonging to this month are nearly identical to two other months that also sacrifice children to Tlaloc in exchange for rain (Atemoztli and Atlcahualo). The difference in location and manner of sacrifice are not enough to justify the rest of the story. But one (somewhat dated) article, by Michael Graulich, mentioned the existence of a feast of public inebriation taking place in the same month. Nobles were involved, children were involved. The perfect thing to use instead of the main feast and grant this part of the ixiptla some colour!
But what are Graulich's sources? It was the Codex Magliabechiano, one written after the Spanish conquest by a local friar. This particular documentation of Aztec religion and rituals was done with the explicit purpose of converting the people away from it. Note that this same book contains descriptions of cannibalism and pederasty. An accounting of the worst Christian sins ascribed to the native Mexicans; no better way to convince them to pick up the cross.
So what do I do with that information? My only source for a ritual is one written by authors motivated to depict Aztec rituals are barbarish and sinful... but I totally lack other rituals to use in this timeframe.
I don't know. This is where I burned myself out. The system for Ixiptla is done. I've got a dynamic calendar wheel (admittedly still in need of some art polish), a selection process, weighting by character attributes; every single thing set up to just be filled in 18 times. That's when I made the announcement; when I was certain that I could find at least 18 things for an Aztec god-impersonator to do. Interesting things that can be gamified.
But I don't know how to do this respectfully. The only motivation for this mod is to do things better than the other depictions of Aztecs in pop culture. Maybe I still can, by doing more and more research, and the possible burning down of a lot of my existing code and assumptions. That's not fun, and if I can't have fun writing for it - which is meant to be the most fun part, to give me energy for debugging - then the mod itself is no longer rewarding to me.
Enough feeling sorry for myself, on to the practical matters.
- I'm going to port Sunset Invasion to 1.5. Not on February 7th; but in a matter of days. Less than two weeks is my goal. It involves starting over from the Steam version and upgrading that to 1.5, rather than stripping out Ixiptla from the WIP version I have been working on for the past few months. Hence the delay. I am also starting a pre-master in the same time and I have yet to experience how much it will affect my free time.
- I will release several mods in the coming week. Most of them are tutorial mods or 1.5 QoL modlets that I bet will be made obsolete whenever Paradox itself gets along to implementing the same feature. One mod however, is one I added to whenever Sunset Invasion burned me out again. You'll find it is quite sizeable.
- Ixiptla is not dead and buried (or sacrificed). I will return to it when I have fun doing the history again. Maybe I'll implement it some other way, maybe I am just one codex page away from completion. We shall see.
Thank you all for the patience.
