CAGD ePortfolio

For Sprint 25, we did a great amount of work, which I’m really proud of the team for doing. There were a good amount of edits we did to the text and the UI of the games. We were able to get in an extra person to help fix a few bugs, and finally got to attacking our AI problem. We were even able to fit in a new mini text level and our prototype scenario creator. After all that, we created a build that I would consider is the most complete we’ve had yet. From the previous sprint playtesting with Dan, he mentioned that the camera rotation was majorly off (despite none of us realizing it until he pointed it out) and that the visualization layers undrawing themselves was not unacceptable. The visualization layers undrawing was a thing before I came onto the project, so I figured that was something that would have been too difficult to change. But luckily, we were able to get a person to help us fix these up, and within the sprint too! I was a bit worried that the documentation we had ...

  The fourth sprint felt like it started a bit wonky because we needed to put out a build while there was not much to the game. The AI caused some weird problems, so we had to turn it off for this build. We did some playtests with a few MADT students and with Dan as well. Other than doing a playtest, our programmer was hard at work getting in certain features that the marketing team needed, as well as getting the aftershock forecasts to be more accurate. He added in a command in the dev console to be able to freely move the camera and also changed the notification system so that it’d work off the real life aftershock forecast update schedule. Notification System On the first Thursday of the sprint, two MADT students from the marketing team came over to interview us. To be honest, while I am technically the most equipped to answer questions out of our group, I didn’t really feel like I could really add too much. I expected a lot of hard questions, but for the most part, we were ...

  In the third sprint, we are mostly on track with the direction we’re going. Unfortunately, a lot of it is still just programming, so our programmer ends up doing the large bulk of the work. For the first half of the sprint, there was still a bit of uncertainty since we had a lot of trouble thinking up a name and we had been waiting several weeks for data from the USGS. Luckily we were able to get a large spreadsheet of the 2023 Turkiye earthquake sequence on Tuesday, so we should ideally be able to use it on the next sprint. The big things we were able to get done this sprint were the formula parser and getting the forecast to actually work properly. Also, while working on the earthquakes, our programmer noticed a visual issue with them, mainly that they all look the same regardless of magnitude. Most of the work we did isn’t necessarily anything visual, but they were very important nonetheless.   In the first half of the sprint, we continued the struggle with the title....

  In this second sprint, I think I can say our team was able to get some work done. The marketing team meetings really eat into class time, which is kind of annoying, but at least we are mostly out of the pre-production phase. The other people on the team still need some time to familiarize themselves with the project.   Meanwhile, our programmer went to work on creating an “earthquake scheduler” scriptable object that could be used to plan out the earthquakes so that users could potentially create their own scenario and see how the earthquakes affect the map at certain times. I really like that the programmer made documentation even someone like me, a less than middling programmer, can understand. At the moment, we’re waiting for the earthquake data from the USGS scientists to come in so we can make sure that the scriptable object is accurate.   Our team had to meet up with the marketing team to talk about creating a new name for the game, as “Aftershock Forecaster...

  This semester, I am still the producer on the USGS Aftershock Forecast project. Despite being experienced on the project since I was on it last semester, it’s still no less nerve wracking than it was when I first started. Unlike last semester, we were actually able to have first-person talks and playtests with people from USGS.   One thing I considered unexpected was the type of people that would be brought into the project. I thought we would get another all-programmer team like last semester and continue what we were doing. But instead, we get a definite designer (although technically all of us can design) and just one main programmer. We are potentially able to have more programmers working on the project if the other teams have them free to do things. Although, we can never have enough programmers.   This sprint ended up being a pre-production phase, and our in class time was taken up by meetings with a marketing team. I remember the team being vaguely mention...

  It’s the final blog post of the semester for Aftershock Simulator! I think our team did pretty well, despite our rough transition. In the beginning, we really had no idea what we were doing, and so it’s really quite a shame that we really only got started in the middle of the semester. I think this team was really good and they demonstrated their abilities well. Our team begins at Sprint 14. A part of the rough transition we had was essentially our team being confused as to what our goal was and how we would attain that goal. Our goal was for the game to teach the user how to use the Aftershock Forecast in order to better determine what to do in an actual earthquake. But our team has no idea how the Aftershock Forecast even works in the first place, so it’s pretty difficult to teach something you don’t understand. The previous team was only able to get to writing the code for the earthquake simulations, so they weren’t really able to get to any actual gameplay yet. Learning O...