Hey! I hope everyone had a fun and safe Halloween! In Michigan, where I’ve lived all my life so far, this is about when we start getting our first snow and it gets VERY dark by 7pm. At the very least, my car door is pretty consistently frozen shut now when I go to open it in the morning. However, with the passing of Halloween, we have entered what I and many radio stations all over the country consider the Holiday Season. Soon we’ll be chowing down on turkey and stuffing!

This week marks the midpoint for development on my capstone project, and so far my team and I have successfully made a functioning Breakout clone. That is, you can now win and lose, so it feels much more like a game now! The second half of this project promises to be a bit more challenging, as it involves creating and training a machine learning agent in Unity to play our now fully developed game. I really want to put my nose to the grindstone here and finish strong on the 2nd half of this capstone. Since this will be my last class for this degree, I’d like to end on as successful of a note as I can muster.

In other news, all of my recent free time has been eaten up by the newest entry in the Age of Empires series, after it’s 10 year(?) hiatus. I’m loving the current direction, especially the “history education”-ish focus of the campaigns. Playing out those old medieval campaigns was a huge draw when I was a kid, and I can still get into it today.