Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 20

  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 Objectives

Another thing that went wrong was the fact that we kind of had to redo most if not all the in-game UI, especially the phone asset. Unfortunately the team had to really rush, so a lot of it was kind of scuffed. The phone UI was stuck in a portrait orientation, making it extremely hard to read the information that it was supposed to display. Our UI designer spent several weeks getting it right. The entire layout of the phone is completely different now. The apps now display their information in a landscape format, and the text is much bigger now. The other parts of the in-game UI (view buttons and action buttons) was moved up to the top of the screen and consolidated into the toolbar along with the objectives.

Original
Present

The settings menu was also revamped in order to fit with the style of the in-game UI. One thing that made it harder than it usually would have been is that most of their UI assets were not reusable. Many of the buttons had the text directly on the image of the button, which made editing them way more tedious than it would have been.

Original
Present

One thing that went well was the idea of mini tutorials and the objectives system. That idea basically lets us stay within a limited scope while also allowing us to be able to add on to the game when we need to. Simply put, our mini tutorials teach the user a feature of the game, and within the tutorials, we have objectives so that the user can focus on what they know in the level. Our target audience is emergency managers, and they are usually non tech savvy people. That results in our objectives being very simple so we can doubly make sure that we know that they know what each and every part of the game is. This also helps us reach our goal of making sure that the user reaches the learning objectives.

Another thing I think that went well is how the programmers were able to write and design features so that future programmers could understand them easily. Our programmers wrote easy to understand tutorials on how to add in objectives to the objectives system and the dev hack system. We also have a sample tutorial scene for the future tutorials we make, so that the new team can just duplicate the sample and add in dialogue and what not.

Lists the console commands.
Part of the tutorial on how the dev console works.

I’ll be sticking around next semester as the producer to help out the teacher, so I hope that we’ll have a much better time working on the project. Now that we have somewhat of a goal to move towards, we can potentially make some decent levels after we finish creating the tutorials. I feel like a difficult part of “restarting” in the next semester is telling the whole team to act as a designer, but at least we can kind of have a head start on what to do.

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