For those of you who have been following this blog since day one (an amazing three weeks now), you’ll know that one of my main concerns was simply just remembering all of the concepts/approaches/mechanism that I have learned throughout this CS journey at OSU. I am pleased to say that, so far so good!
My team and I are working on a replica of the classic Atari Breakout game. In full disclosure, I have never been much of a gamer in my life, be it classic arcade games, PC games, or console games, although I have played variations of Breakout over the years. The main item that really peaked my interest in this project was the neural network element (i.e., train a neural network to compete against players). Luckily, the description of this project was true to its word – Unity and the ML Agents package do almost all of the heavy lifting! Over the course of the last couple weeks, everyone on my team have gone through various tutorials for Unity and ML Agents, and it is currently our belief that we will not only able able to accomplish the basic requirements but also several of the stretch goals. A side benefit of these tutorials was the embedded C# training, a language none of us have used but it appears to be fairly straight forward. This was an exciting realization for all of us, and we are thrilled to get the ball rolling with a high degree of confidence.
Despite the exuberance, we are also well aware that we will stumble at certain points. This could be due to mishaps functioning as a team or simple roadblocks in the actual implementation of the project. We developed, in our eyes, two very strong pieces of documentation to help guide the process: 1) our team standards and 2) our project plan. In addition to these governing documents, we have also maintained near daily communication via our Discord server. Suffice it to say, everything has been going smooth thus far, and we are entering the main development phase with a level of zealousness that I likely haven’t experienced yet in this program.
Onward and upward,…and until next time, see ya later!
