Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 23

  In the third sprint, we are mostly on track with the direction we’re going. Unfortunately, a lot of it is still just programming, so our programmer ends up doing the large bulk of the work. For the first half of the sprint, there was still a bit of uncertainty since we had a lot of trouble thinking up a name and we had been waiting several weeks for data from the USGS. Luckily we were able to get a large spreadsheet of the 2023 Turkiye earthquake sequence on Tuesday, so we should ideally be able to use it on the next sprint. The big things we were able to get done this sprint were the formula parser and getting the forecast to actually work properly. Also, while working on the earthquakes, our programmer noticed a visual issue with them, mainly that they all look the same regardless of magnitude. Most of the work we did isn’t necessarily anything visual, but they were very important nonetheless.


  In the first half of the sprint, we continued the struggle with the title. One of the reasons why we had a hard time picking a name is that we probably had the wrong idea of what an emergency manager was. And thus, we created a user profile on them. The most notable thing was that the average age was around 45. Most of the title ideas that we had were pretty juvenile, so we needed to think up something more professional. The teacher ended up picking something boring, but that’s what you have to do.

While our programmer knocked out a bunch of the hard-hitting tasks, us others in the group were mainly just doing polish work. In-game text was changed to fix up a few errors and a lot of UI was fixed up. Something that’s tedious about the changing things in the game is that there are a lot of scenes for each of the tutorials, and the way we have everything set up is that when we make something new, we’ll need to add it into all those scenes. For example, I needed to re-add the nice settings menu that I created last semester (it got merged out through Github somehow) and it was really tedious.I was working on changing the dialogue boxes so that it uses a blank background with character icons instead of having it all in one merged image.


For some reason, the original image had some gigantic transparency margins, so it made it difficult to position properly. Everything being merged together made it difficult to change its proportions without squishing it and making it look ugly, so it had to be switched out. The dialogue systems were made assuming that it’d be using the merged image, so I ended up encountering an error while in play mode. Although once you unpaused the game, it’d usually load the dialogue just fine.
The formula parser that the programmer created is certainly an amazing feat. It really makes a designer’s job significantly easier. As someone who is not well versed in coding, I don’t know if I can fully explain how it works, but all you have to know is how crazy it is that with the parser, you can type in a string (computers cannot do math with what they think is just words) and it’ll translate it into numbers and operators so that the computer will actually do the calculations for you.

It was created because we don’t really know what equations actual scientists use. With it, we can easily replace the formulas used in certain calculations. For example, something that we were confused on is how the math for calculating the probabilities of the aftershock forecast worked. The original team had something working for it, but the probabilities generated for the higher magnitudes were irregularly high (like 60%). We’re still waiting on input from the USGS, so for now we’re just using a fake formula.

Despite this only being the third sprint, it already almost feels like the semester is over. Maybe it’s because my other classes are about to start their final projects at the end of the month. For this game, unfortunately this is the final semester that any work will be able to be done on it. I had been thinking there would be another semester to the project, but we basically don’t have any resources anymore, so we’ll have to ship with what we got. We’ll have to work really hard in order to make sure that we are able to release a good product by the end.



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