Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 26

  In this sprint, we were mostly focused on fleshing out the scenario creator. Other than making functions that already existed within the creator available to the player, we added in a bit more functionality. Because of all that new functionality, we needed to revamp the layout of the creator in order to make it more user friendly. There were also a few bugs to fix, and by now basically all of them have been squashed! Finally, since it’s the penultimate sprint, I spent some time creating the credits page and redoing the instructions page on the main menu.

Some of the bugs we tackled this sprint had been there for a while, but only now did we really have the time to deal with them. One example is the time not showing up properly in the quake tracker. Instead of saying 06:05 like a normal clock would, it’d say 6:5. According to our programmer, the previous team did have some code to fix that, but it never worked.

There was also a bug in the quake tracker app in which it’d stop keeping track of earthquakes after the 8th one. Now, it’s been changed so that it’ll add the newest quake and delete the oldest one whenever an earthquake happens.

From the previous iteration of the scenario creator, we added in the ability to name your custom scenario and save it so you can access it later. You can also delete it to remove the clutter of having a lot of scenarios in the selection menu. One new feature we added was to edit the number of days that a scenario lasts. By default, the limit is 30 days. Although, I’ve noticed through several playtesting sessions that no one seems to want to ever get to that point.

When the day limit is hit, then an evaluation screen will pop up, showing off a few stats based on your performance. This screen was always in the game, but there was never really a concrete gameplay loop that had the evaluations make any sense. Now that we’re pivoting to just letting the player mess around in a sandbox, all the screen does is count the number of earthquakes that happened and the lives saved.

Our final layout for the scenario creator looks like this, and gives off the office vibe that is shared across the other menu UI in the game.

    Now that all of the important UI was taken care of, I decided to clean up the main menu’s pages since those were the only ones left. The “How To Use” page had basically been untouched since the initial team was working on it, and I figured now would be the perfect time to revamp it. Previously, the instructions were just a screenshot of a google document slapped into a scroll view. They were working through some major crunch, so they definitely didn’t have time to set up a professional-looking layout.

I utilized the features of TextMeshPro to color in the text and add in sprites. It was a lot less finicky than I thought it’d be, but it was still somewhat tedious. I also removed a few instructions that were on the previous version since those didn’t apply to our new builds. I did my best to streamline it, but text is probably not the best way to explain the controls. I hope the text is not too much.
    Lastly, I finalized the credits page. Previously, it had been left completely blank in the project. Oddly enough, there is a credits page for the initial team left in our google drive folder for the project, but it was never added into the game as far as I’ve seen. Trying to make space and fit all the names and roles there took a bit of time, but I think I got an ok layout done. I always worry about crediting people for their work properly, so I might go back and attempt to fix it. But truly, I thank everyone who’s worked on this project!



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