So I’m going to be honest. I went out of town for the weekend and didn’t get a lot done this week. BUT I got the ball to correctly change direction depending on where on the paddle the ball hits. Now, the only basic functionality we have remaining on the game is to make the ball change angle depending on where on the paddle the ball hits. This should be slightly more challenging than changing the direction, because I believe you can’t simply change the angle. You need to change the x and y velocities. This is an issue as we want the velocity to be the same the whole time. Although looking at some other Breakout clones and remakes, it does appear the ball occasionally increases speed, depending on how the paddle hits it.

After we get the paddle working, we can move on to the start and game over screens, and having the game over screen triggered by either the ball falling off screen or all the bricks being destroyed. Then we can move on to the last part, incorporating machine learning to make the computer control the paddle. As stated before, this is perhaps the most interesting part for me, and the part in which I have no clue how it will work. Hopefully it won’t be too challenging.

Lastly will be actually turning the Unity script into a game. I have no idea how to do that but I imagine it’s fairly simple. We also need to make semi-professional looking start and end screens. Apparently Unity also has some ways to help you with this, which, again, is interesting to me, as you can create a whole game yourself, rather than relying on a graphic designer here.

All in all, it’s been a productive week. My other class, Parallel Programming, is proving interesting and useful. It turns out the class teaches methods to speed up your code without even using parallel programming (like whether you access memory in a 2D array vertically or horizontally). I’ll keep you guys updated on how things are going. Looking forward to seeing where we’re at a week from now!