Things are coming right up and along with the video game! We are going to be meeting with the client, a SME on the 1812 New Madrid Earthquakes that Ground Truth is about. We’ve worked out the major kinks in the prototype, and are moving into that phase of developement concerned with content, aesthetic, and feel. I’ve made a lot of minor changes akin to cleaning, like refactoring, debugging, changing menu designs, and so on. I also made the NPCs stop when they come close while you’re already talking to someone - a needed quality-of-life fix.

In the future, I plan to make some changes to the way evidence is stored. Currently, the same piece of information, something like

	"There continues to be small tremors in New Madrid, even far after the earthquake."

is visible to the player in three places: in the investigative menu, the player’s journal, and in the article that the player submits at the end of the game, based on what they deemed fact or cap. I plan to add different things for each. One will be a quote taken from the dialogue, and one will be a fact about the event that in-game comes from the player character’s research.

This will allow for another big change which I brought up in the last blog entry: allowing multiple NPCs to comment on the same issue. This will mean making a couple of new sprites, which has been widely recognized as a pretty good time (sometimes I go to piskel just to doodle). I think that these changes will allow for more opportunities to educate the player on this historical event, and further to make the gameplay more engaging.