Development on the capstone is going strong! I gained much more familiarity with Unity’s UI over this past week, as I added scripts to the ball and paddle of my team’s Breakout clone. Given our progress so far, I’m optimistic that we’ll get to start working on our machine learning agent soon.

I’m actually happy that I got to work on this Breakout capstone project specifically since, though I haven’t been able to devote the time that I’d like, I’ve always wanted to make games as a hobby. Now, after having an excuse, and obligation, to work in Unity throughout the week, I’m really enjoying finally using one of the more popular tools of the game-making trade. I don’t think I’d ever sign on to pursue game development as a full time career, but seeing the success of some single-developer games like Stardew Valley makes that effort look very satisfying.

I’m also finding just working in Unity to be overall very smooth. I really enjoy the responsiveness of dynamic adjustments to component values while the game is running. As long as the scripts compile, there are a plethora of interesting values to tweak just using a slider or number field.