Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 24

  The fourth sprint felt like it started a bit wonky because we needed to put out a build while there was not much to the game. The AI caused some weird problems, so we had to turn it off for this build. We did some playtests with a few MADT students and with Dan as well. Other than doing a playtest, our programmer was hard at work getting in certain features that the marketing team needed, as well as getting the aftershock forecasts to be more accurate. He added in a command in the dev console to be able to freely move the camera and also changed the notification system so that it’d work off the real life aftershock forecast update schedule.

Notification System

On the first Thursday of the sprint, two MADT students from the marketing team came over to interview us. To be honest, while I am technically the most equipped to answer questions out of our group, I didn’t really feel like I could really add too much. I expected a lot of hard questions, but for the most part, we were able to answer them well and I felt like they asked some pretty insightful questions. They asked about what each of us liked about developing the game, and personally, while I would like more people on the team, I really liked having a small team so I could get to know the teammates better. I hope they were able to get some good content for their campaign. They did mention needing specific dates in order to potentially show how the development cycle went, but unfortunately I couldn’t really answer too much on that since the bulk of the development was from the initial team that worked on it.

We also had the MADT students playtest the game, as you can never have enough fresh playtesters. This playtest session with them was really not much different from previous ones, but I would say I learned something new with it. Our lack of feedback makes it really difficult to notice when an objective is finished and the tutorials are very much a “skip through all the text and hurry up” type thing. I noticed that they started from the last tutorial instead of the first, probably because it seemed like it would have the most content. Also, they didn’t really touch the scrollbar in the tutorial screen until we pointed it out. Personally, I found it a bit annoying since the sandbox level they’d use to potentially get footage is right under it (but it’s not like there’s anything that directly points to it anyway).

Sandbox Level (with freecamera dev heck)

Dan also playtested for us, and his input was very well appreciated. One thing he noticed (that we didn’t) was how janky the camera was. Apparently the camera rig is set up in a way so that when you zoom in or out, it’ll move the camera rig away from its parented position, so rotating the camera won’t make it rotate where the camera is. Somehow, none of us were able to notice that incredibly glaring bug. He pointed out that some of the text in the tutorials wasn’t really all that clear. For example, in the second level, the last part asks you to focus on some objects. We just mean position the camera over to where the object is, but it makes it sound like it’s an in-game action.

I thought this sprint would also be a good time to plan out the scenario creator we needed. Technically it’s already in the game, but only as a Unity tool. We need to actually expose it to the player so that they can make their own and play them. The tool itself is probably somewhat confusing to anyone outside of the team, so we made a layout for it.

Scenario Creator Layout

This sprint was somewhat hectic because of the break right in the middle, but our team usually treks along. We went slightly down in velocity, but only by .75 points. I definitely didn’t do enough this sprint, and I would like to rectify that in the next sprint. I had started on a few tasks but wasn’t able to finish in time, so I should be able to complete them quickly in the next one.

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