CAGD ePortfolio

  For this sprint, there were many important things planned. It’s kind of a shame that this is the penultimate sprint and we’re only now getting to work on teaching the mechanics of the game to the player. This feels like it should be the third or fourth sprint of the semester. We’ve finally gotten into the groove and there’s only 4 weeks left. In any case, we were able to finish up 44 points out of 83 this sprint. One thing we got started on was a “building debris” mechanic. To put it simply, when a building is damaged, there’s a possibility that it could spawn debris on the road tiles near it. It’s basically an easier implementation of the previously planned “landslide” mechanic, but the difference is that we don’t require input from an expert for the data on how to implement it. Planning is easy, but the hard part is implementing it. Every time a new obstacle is added into the AI’s path, it kind of has to recreate what its available paths are. Doing that is really taxing on a ...

  It is now Sprint 18, and there are about 5 weeks left of the semester (excluding break and finals week). Seems like things are about to wind down for the other teams, but for our team, we’re really only getting started! At the beginning of the sprint, we were really running out of things to do. Now that our team has gotten relatively familiar with what’s in the project, we’re beginning to be able to teach more advanced things in the project. We were able to finish about 45 points out of 88 this sprint. We’re going about the same rate but slightly less this time because I wasn’t able to prepare enough for people to do on kickoff day, so I ended up assigning some tasks later in the sprint. There were mainly bug fixes to be made. The main things we did was revamping the UI and adding in the objectives dropdown. Now you’re actually able to see what you need to do in the game. One thing our team was talking about was how the information on the phone was really difficult to read....

  In Sprint 17 of the Aftershock Simulator project, I assigned 76 points and 48 of those points were completed. The main goal for this sprint was to finish up the rest of the things we had planned: tutorials about the visualization layers, and a dev hack addition too. And of course, we continue our UI fixes too. There are still a few more things to do, but at this rate, we actually will run out of things to do after at least the next sprint. As a producer, I feel a little bit of frustration when the velocity gets lower, but technically the chart I made doesn’t take into account the team size. The previous team had around 10 people while ours is half that. Just looking at the current team’s velocity, we average around 45 points and steadily going up little by little. Our team's velocity, separated from the previous group. Even though this sprint is number 4 out of 7 for the semester, our team doesn’t exactly have that hard deadline like the other teams do, so we’re not feeling...

  On sprint 16 in Aftershock Simulator, I assigned the team 87 points and 51 points were finished. We’re beginning to pick up now that we have a plan on what to do. In this sprint, our team started on the tutorial levels and the objectives system. And of course, there was some extra work to do for the UI in the game as well.   As a producer, I still find it difficult to gauge the difficulty of a task, especially when it comes to programming. I still end up needing to change the point values of some cards because they end up more difficult than expected. For example, I had figured that creating the basis for the objectives system wouldn’t have been too difficult, but not necessarily. A few of the objectives require you to click certain UI elements on the screen, and the things that would “listen” to those UI elements are all each in their own separate scripts, so now there’s the added work of finding them and knowing where to put the code. I always end up asking people if t...

  Hello! It’s sprint 15 of the Aftershock Simulator project. In this sprint, we had 97 points assigned and 48 completed. More than last time, but to say it’s been a bit of a rough transition is kind of putting it lightly. Later in the sprint, our team had a discussion with our teacher, who is the head of the project. Unlike the previous semester in which there was a student as a designer, our teacher would now take their place in order to avoid this rough transition that we had with future development teams.   One thing I had a bit of difficulty with is that for most of the sprint, I didn’t have access to Github which hampered my ability to understand how the code in the project worked and even how programmers would cre ate new features. Now that I do have access, I am again worried because I’m a sprint behind everyone in understanding the code better and also it’s kind of a mess. Our main UI designer wanted to rehaul the in-game UI, and that’s going to end up being more o...

  Hello! I’m the new producer on the Aftershock Simulator project for the USGS program. The Aftershock Simulator is created with the intention of teaching potential rescue workers how to best save as many lives as possible in the event of an earthquake. As this is a project that’s being continued rather than starting from scratch, I needed to read through the notes that the previous team left over while devising new tasks for the new team. I was a bit worried about not being ready for kickoff, but now that this sprint is over, I think I and the team have almost gotten ourselves familiar with the project and are mostly ready to go. In this sprint, our team was mostly reading through the learning objectives for the game and understanding what was already created. I assigned people new features that might have helped to introduce them into the project, but most of those were not completed just yet. For this sprint, I assigned the team 81 points and 34 of those were completed. That...

  Sprint 6 was mostly a sprint with not a lot to do. I basically had everyone finish up everything they needed to do on the project. Programmers always have stuff to do, but it was a little bit difficult thinking of things for the others to do, since there’s no time to fully implement a new level design and there’s not much of a point in adding new models. It was also time to start working on the marketing images, so I had a person on the team start on those. Since I’m the person who works on the UI, I thought it would be a good idea to begin working on making the menus look a little prettier. I bet players don’t want the default Unity UI in their game. Figuring out things to do for the modeler and the texturer were somewhat difficult. We were able to find some textures that needed to be done that happened to have slipped through the cracks previously, which was good. But in the next sprint, there’s basically nothing to do. For the modeler, I had him mostly focus on getting the...