Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 14

  Hello! I’m the new producer on the Aftershock Simulator project for the USGS program. The Aftershock Simulator is created with the intention of teaching potential rescue workers how to best save as many lives as possible in the event of an earthquake. As this is a project that’s being continued rather than starting from scratch, I needed to read through the notes that the previous team left over while devising new tasks for the new team. I was a bit worried about not being ready for kickoff, but now that this sprint is over, I think I and the team have almost gotten ourselves familiar with the project and are mostly ready to go. In this sprint, our team was mostly reading through the learning objectives for the game and understanding what was already created. I assigned people new features that might have helped to introduce them into the project, but most of those were not completed just yet.

For this sprint, I assigned the team 81 points and 34 of those were completed.


That doesn’t seem good at all, but that’s because the new team needed to get familiar with what was already in the project. In order for the programmers to start coding anything, they of course need to read through the code and understand what’s going on. In order to make sure they understood the code, I asked the previous designer of the project to devise a little quiz for the programmers to do so they could have a bit of a guide on what to pay attention to when reading through the code.
Excerpt of the code understanding quiz for programmers!


This turned out to be WAY more daunting than expected. For example, it was difficult to find certain scripts as they were mixed in with commented out scripts that didn’t do anything or placed in folders that you wouldn’t think to look in. One new thing I learned was that the commented out scripts are industry standard so other programmers can reference them, but unfortunately it’s frustrating to sift through. Currently, the programmers are still in the process of doing that little understanding quiz, but now they can at least somewhat understand how to code for what they were assigned. I was really scared that I needed to cut down on their load, but they assured me that it was alright.

The way that the class is formatted is a little bit odd in that the animators and the audio creators in the class aren’t assigned to a specific team. Since our project already has work done on it, they were directed to us first. I wasn’t able to give anything to the animators because there doesn’t seem to be anything that requires special animation (yet). I struggled with thinking of stuff for the audio people to do, but I was able to settle on a few soundtracks and some sound effects. Feel free to listen to the main menu music. Although, since there were already sound effects in the project, it’s only going to get harder for me to assign them work!

For the future, there are a few things that I need to pay attention to. One thing that is of utmost importance is that the AI needs to be nearly redone. In the notes, it says that the AI needs to be remade without the literals it currently has. This is going to take a large amount of time and is clearly more difficult than it seems. Unfortunately, I am not a great coder, so I’m going to have to rely on the programmers to tell me their process on how they’re going to recreate the AI so that I can write their cards more effectively. Another thing I noticed was that there seemed to be no feedback as to whether the player was actually saving anyone, so that has to be paid attention to in the next sprint. There also seemed to be a small bug in which the building repair time didn’t display properly. Also, there is no actual end programmed in the game, so we’re definitely going to have to get that done soon as well. I would have assigned these at the beginning of this sprint, but I was incredibly terrified of overloading the team with things they didn’t understand yet. Here’s to a productive development period!

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