Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 21

  This semester, I am still the producer on the USGS Aftershock Forecast project. Despite being experienced on the project since I was on it last semester, it’s still no less nerve wracking than it was when I first started. Unlike last semester, we were actually able to have first-person talks and playtests with people from USGS.

  One thing I considered unexpected was the type of people that would be brought into the project. I thought we would get another all-programmer team like last semester and continue what we were doing. But instead, we get a definite designer (although technically all of us can design) and just one main programmer. We are potentially able to have more programmers working on the project if the other teams have them free to do things. Although, we can never have enough programmers.

  This sprint ended up being a pre-production phase, and our in class time was taken up by meetings with a marketing team. I remember the team being vaguely mentioned at the end of last semester, but now it looks like they’re getting very involved. That team was composed of people from the MEDX class, which is kind of like the 495 of the MADT major. Last Tuesday when we started, our meeting with them was mainly about getting them up to speed about where we left off last semester. Jeff showed off my postmortem from last semester, explained what we added, and showed off what we had in the game. It was basically a few tutorials that explained how to use some of the features of the game.

  They had a ton of questions that took up all of the time in class, not leaving our team any time to actually get set up. Someone from the marketing team asked if they could playtest, but nearly all of them have a Mac and we build for Windows. Crazy, huh?
    This Monday, me and the designer on the team were invited to a dinner with some people from the marketing team in order to give a warm welcome to the USGS researchers that were coming to play our game. We were able to have a long and fruitful discussion with one of them. She mentioned how during the Canterbury earthquake sequence (which she personally experienced), the first big earthquake happened and there were very few casualties due to it occurring early in the morning. A lot of people (including emergency managers) thought and even denied that there would be another aftershock that would devastate them, and unfortunately they were proven very wrong. A tool like what we’re creating could potentially teach them about the importance of the Aftershock Forecast as well as tell them the importance of acting early.
  This Tuesday, we had the USGS researchers come around and caught them up on what we were doing. This was a great help as last semester, we were unable to get any of them to do a playtest for us, so we were somewhat aimless. They were able to point out a few bugs for us, as well as tell us some parts of the game that might be inaccurate or misleading.
    The quake tracker we have in the game tells the player the magnitude of an earthquake right after it’s happened. But in real life, that type of information is given to people about 20 minutes after the earthquake. Instead, the type of shaking is usually what’s given immediately after.
  Our team struggled with thinking up some kind of core gameplay mechanic. The first team also struggled with it as well, and it didn’t really teach the learning objectives. The USGS researchers suggested making the game mainly a sandbox experience, so that there won’t necessarily need to be a win-loss condition. Quantifying the level of success here is quite difficult, after all. They also suggested creating scenarios you can plug into the sandbox based off of real life data, so players can see how a historic earthquake sequence affected a city. This feels much more doable than what we did earlier, but I am kind of sad to see the old level idea go. Hopefully in the next sprint, we’ll be able to get the ball rolling and make something great!

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