I had put this game on hold for two reasons. First, I was inspired to make my Middle Eastern themed Dungeon Crawler "Islands of the Caliph" which was released in September of last year. Second, because I could not think of any interesting ways to finish this game.
Well after finishing Islands, I started thinking about Aberration Analyst a bit. It occurred to me that most of what I wanted the game to do was already there and working. It just needed to be rounded out with some additional features, and polished up a bit.
So I made a list of things to add or improve upon and I am making good progress on it.
Tabloids:
So far I have made some major changes to how the tabloids operate. They still fulfill the same basic purpose. However, instead of getting a list of headlines on one page, I have a different "newspaper" for each headline that the player will have to sort through. They will still be able to mark the headline on their map for reference.
Additionally, when you click on a city in the map view, the appropriate headline for that city will show up in the notes at the bottom of the screen, so you will not have to go back and forth between the tabloid view to remember which headline was about which city.
The headlines themselves have changed too. They no longer all follow the same sentence structure. I now have two basic sentence structures, but plan to add more before I am done. It is really an aesthetic change, but I think that aesthetics are an important part of the atmosphere of this game, so it was crucial to include this.
Other aesthetic improvements include different formats and titles for the various tabloid magazines. It's no longer just "The Brobdingnagian Gazette" but there are over twenty different periodicals to look through.
Here's an example:
Other Stuff:
I have other plans for how the game functions. The rolodex will provide a list of hunters that you can call on, instead of just selecting "aberration specialist" when sending a team. The general team will also not be capturing or destroying aberrations, but collecting physical evidence and interviewing witnesses.
Successful captures/destruction of aberrations will also give you lore, which will appear in the books. This will be a kind of meta progression, and allow you to benefit on your next play-through.