Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 22

  In this second sprint, I think I can say our team was able to get some work done. The marketing team meetings really eat into class time, which is kind of annoying, but at least we are mostly out of the pre-production phase. The other people on the team still need some time to familiarize themselves with the project.

  Meanwhile, our programmer went to work on creating an “earthquake scheduler” scriptable object that could be used to plan out the earthquakes so that users could potentially create their own scenario and see how the earthquakes affect the map at certain times. I really like that the programmer made documentation even someone like me, a less than middling programmer, can understand. At the moment, we’re waiting for the earthquake data from the USGS scientists to come in so we can make sure that the scriptable object is accurate.

  Our team had to meet up with the marketing team to talk about creating a new name for the game, as “Aftershock Forecaster (or Aftershock Simulator)” is already the name of an existing USGS product. We went to their classroom and they came up with a lot of truly interesting names. Yes, they were really funny, but unfortunately we can’t use them. We in the team thought that “Aftershock 101: Seismic Sequence” was a pretty decent name. Although, one of our teachers pointed out that the ‘101’ part of the title made it sound a tad bit belittling to our target audience of (assumedly) experienced emergency managers. So, we’re still at the drawing board for the title name.

  One thing that was noted in the playtest is that the dialogue boxes were way too big. I had already known this last semester, but I figured it’d be way too much of a hassle to fix. For some reason, the dialogue boxes and the character icons that go on top of them were merged together into one image, which made it a lot more difficult to change their size ratios without disgustingly squishing it.
  A lot of the original images in the game are like that, which I find really confusing. The incoming call screen is like this too, but luckily that was an easy fix. The character icons themselves as images aren’t all in the Google drive, but they were in the 1 GB photoshop file that contained most of the old assets that the team before I came onto the project made.
  While trying to fix up the dialogue boxes, I realized that it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I thought I would just be able to copy, paste, and reattach the connecting parts, but not exactly. Last semester, I had two people work on creating tutorials, and they did them in different ways. One person used the dialogue system based off of what was in the original in-game scene, and the other person used a slightly different dialogue system. The two were mostly similar, but the one in the original in-game scene was pretty spaghetti coded. I was able to get the dialogue boxes looking and mostly working properly with the newer dialogue system, but now I’m dreading that I will most likely need to redo the rest of the tutorials dialogue.
  Unfortunately, I had also noticed that the settings menu and the audio manager I made last semester seems to have been merged out of existence. I’m pretty sure re-adding them back in shouldn’t be as much of a hassle compared to how changing the dialogue turned out to be. These two weeks ended up being extremely busy for me since one of my other classes had a big project happening at the exact same time. I’m super tired, but I think I’m ready to start the new sprint!

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