Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 19

  For this sprint, there were many important things planned. It’s kind of a shame that this is the penultimate sprint and we’re only now getting to work on teaching the mechanics of the game to the player. This feels like it should be the third or fourth sprint of the semester. We’ve finally gotten into the groove and there’s only 4 weeks left. In any case, we were able to finish up 44 points out of 83 this sprint.

One thing we got started on was a “building debris” mechanic. To put it simply, when a building is damaged, there’s a possibility that it could spawn debris on the road tiles near it. It’s basically an easier implementation of the previously planned “landslide” mechanic, but the difference is that we don’t require input from an expert for the data on how to implement it. Planning is easy, but the hard part is implementing it. Every time a new obstacle is added into the AI’s path, it kind of has to recreate what its available paths are. Doing that is really taxing on a computer, and the amount of times the buildings will spawn debris is random. A basic version has been implemented, and in the next sprint, we’re going to add in the 3D models of the rubble so that it doesn’t just look like gray blocks everywhere.

  Some more things we got done is really getting to work on the phone UI. Now that most if not all of its assets are finished, now is the time to use them. Our UI designer had a lot planned for the phone to make it feel a lot better. The quake tracker info section looks a lot nicer than before, giving you more space to see the text. The MMI info section has a nicer looking legend so that you can easily tell the probabilities of what magnitude earthquake might happen. Also, you can maximize and minimize the phone’s space on the screen, so you can pull or close it up depending on what you prefer.




  A great addition we had to our in-game UI is the legends that explain the MMI scale and the ground conditions. The soil types are not very obvious at first glance, so having this here is really helpful. The map visualization kind of makes it look like there are more than 4 types.

  The settings menu was also redone as the previous one was really rushed and rough. It’s not currently 100% implemented, but all the design is there. Right now only the screen settings and return button should be working properly because we haven’t really focused on the sounds as of now.

  We also changed how the tagging buildings mechanic works so that it’s more accurate to the emergency manager experience. Previously, you had to tag the building yourself, but now the game handles it for you if you send a worker over there. The interactable tag menu has been moved to the debug console, in case we’d still like to use it for something. The queueing has also been moved there as technically, it’d be better if we forced the user to need to pay attention to using up their resources.

  One thing I’m really proud of is that we were able to get a new map working and looking fine! There’s still stuff that needs to be done as we needed to copy over elements from the previous scenes and we’re going to be creating a tutorial that uses the map. I was terrified that the previous team’s code was more hardcoded than expected, but seems like that wasn’t the case.

  I hope that we’ll be able to finish up everything we have in the next sprint. The programming right now is pretty complicated and it’s a bit of a shame that we’ve only been able to get to it so late. It’s the very last sprint, so the deadline is much more harsh than any of the ones we’ve experienced so far. Although technically for our group, we’ve probably been having it way too easy.

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