Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 18

  It is now Sprint 18, and there are about 5 weeks left of the semester (excluding break and finals week). Seems like things are about to wind down for the other teams, but for our team, we’re really only getting started! At the beginning of the sprint, we were really running out of things to do. Now that our team has gotten relatively familiar with what’s in the project, we’re beginning to be able to teach more advanced things in the project.

We were able to finish about 45 points out of 88 this sprint. We’re going about the same rate but slightly less this time because I wasn’t able to prepare enough for people to do on kickoff day, so I ended up assigning some tasks later in the sprint. There were mainly bug fixes to be made.



The main things we did was revamping the UI and adding in the objectives dropdown. Now you’re actually able to see what you need to do in the game. One thing our team was talking about was how the information on the phone was really difficult to read. Some of the information text on there is just incredibly puny. So, we ended up having a complete rehaul of the phone’s UI. The main issue was everything being stuck within the portrait orientation of the phone, so we decided to make the information readable by rotating the phone and making the layout landscape instead.



One thing we were able to do is get in a tagging system for the player. Technically, it was always already in the game, as buildings will get tagged automatically when an earthquake happens. However, it is more accurate to the emergency manager experience if they initiate the tagging themselves. The way we have it working right now is that you, the user, sends a worker over and the building is tagged. Also, when a building is tagged red, the building will automatically be cordoned off. Previously, the cordoning mechanic blocked off both roads and buildings because the previous team needed to rush this mechanic in. Now, we’ve separated the building cordon to only be in the tagging system.

Another thing we got started on is trying to create an entirely new level. We’ve been slightly procrastinating on it, but now that we kind of have a handle on how it works, I believe that our team should actually be able to get our own custom level working. Thanks to the work of the previous team, making the level itself is actually really easy. Basically all you need to do is create your level in the custom tool and it’ll output a custom map data file. And then in a scene, you’d add in the monobehaviours and UI (this is the annoying part) and you’d just need to attach the map data file to the appropriate script.

The glaring mishap that we’re not sure is fixable is that when the game loads in the map data, it’ll fill in the extra unused space with a default dirt model. This might be because the previous team was only thinking that we’d only be doing large cities instead of mini levels. The current San Francisco uses up the entirety of the level designer tool’s area, so we were unable to notice this part.
Later in the sprint, we had a meeting about what else we would be able to add into the game. As of now, the game doesn’t necessarily feel like a game, so we had to think about how we’d actually make this fun and interactive for the player. We can now touch on our more advanced mechanics, so in the next sprint, we should be able to teach how search and rescue and the cordoning works. While we don’t necessarily have an overall game loop yet, I feel like having the self-contained levels that will eventually lead up to something bigger is definitely the best way to go for the future.

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