Been a minute! We’ve finished working on Ground Truth for now. Over the past month and a half, I’ve closed 25 issues, and at this point this game is looking pretty good. Each town has at least two people commenting on any given topic, which can be retrieved in the player character’s notebook, or at the workdesk. I had a good time learning about the New Madrid Earthquakes, Tecumseh (not Sherman, but the head of Prophetstown), and phlogiston. I feel that if I were a seventh grader who got to play this game in an Arkansas History class, I’d learn a lot about this particular topic, and more broadly become interested in journalism, and seeking information within my community.

My little brother is ten years old. He was six when Covid began. Despite this, he constantly amazes me with his social awareness, kindness, and genuine desire to interact. I want desparately to do what I can for the rest of his generation, and the rest of my generation, to encourage that kind of behavior. I hope this little video game makes the kids wonder what other people have to say.

The coolest things I did for this game were the article and feedback section. Initially, the game gave a purely numeric score based on how much of your article was factual, which was broken and not really related to anything. I fixed the score, then made it obsolete, by writing about a hundred lines of switch statements that generated feedback for whatever article the player wound up with. There was a great mix there of writing English and writing C#. I also wrote all possible sentences for the article, and the code to assemble them based on user input.

This was a great experience. Even the annoying bugchasing was fun. I’m proud of our finished product, and excited for what we do next.