Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 15

  Hello! It’s sprint 15 of the Aftershock Simulator project. In this sprint, we had 97 points assigned and 48 completed. More than last time, but to say it’s been a bit of a rough transition is kind of putting it lightly. Later in the sprint, our team had a discussion with our teacher, who is the head of the project. Unlike the previous semester in which there was a student as a designer, our teacher would now take their place in order to avoid this rough transition that we had with future development teams.


  One thing I had a bit of difficulty with is that for most of the sprint, I didn’t have access to Github which hampered my ability to understand how the code in the project worked and even how programmers would cre
ate new features. Now that I do have access, I am again worried because I’m a sprint behind everyone in understanding the code better and also it’s kind of a mess. Our main UI designer wanted to rehaul the in-game UI, and that’s going to end up being more of a challenge than expected since code is a part of every single
aspect of the game. We definitely don’t want to touch the code without breaking anything.
  Since we were kind of directionless for part of the sprint, we had a meeting in the middle of the sprint to better understand what our direction was going forward for our team. What the previous team was doing was essentially pre-production and creating the foundation and tools for future teams. What we’re doing now is building the path that the users of the Aftershock Simulator are going to take so that they truly understand the learning objectives.
  The learning objectives are: to be able to define what an Aftershock Forecast is; to be able to describe when the Forecasts are updated; to be able to interpret how the Aftershock Forecasts work; and to be able to find where the Aftershock Forecast webpage is. What we’ve decided to do is to create a really simple level-based tutorial system. The San Francisco level that’s currently in the game right now is way too complicated for a normal user to understand, so we really need to roll all the way back and reteach them. Unlike what us students are used to, our target audience is explicitly NOT gamers, so it’ll sound like we have to “baby” them throughout our tutorial levels.
  Since the San Francisco level attempted to teach everything through dialogue on the phone our levels will be broken down into very small parts. The first level will show the user what an earthquake is, and then the next one will show the player how to move the camera. To go along with this, we’re going to implement an objective system so that the user can keep track of what they have already figured out what to do.
  Another thing we also discussed adding in was a dev hack for us. There is a pre-survey that users must take so that we know what they’re thinking beforehand, but us developers don’t want that. So next sprint, we’re going to add in a system which will let us use certain commands to bypass certain things in order to make testing things easier. Although, other than the pre-survey, I’m not exactly sure what else we need to bypass.

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