My senior project journey has been a very interesting experience. I would say that our most difficult journey would be losing two out of our five team members. My team handled these losses pretty well, but we had to make some sacrifices on the parts of the project we wanted to work on to fill in the missing pieces. Personally, I took the initiative to develop these missing components, ensuring they were completed to a high standard and remained accessible for the rest of the team.
The hardest chunk to fill in was the project’s machine learning / AI aspect. One of the main goals of our project was to use computer vision to somehow create a self-driving car. We were not given any constraints or tips for this, just more of an end goal. Initially, we planned to have many advanced features that sounded cool on paper, but we ended up constraining our scope due to the difficulty of implementing some of those features. We had been planning on using reinforcement learning to control our vehicle for a while, but we recently found out that it would not be that feasible to implement in this project.
I chose this project because I thought working with a gaming engine built with the Rust programming language would be cool. We were also given a list of areas we could focus on for the project. One of these areas was graphics shaders, which I was looking forward to. Unfortunately, once the project was underway, I was told that our focus was now autonomous driving, which is interesting but not something I would have picked myself. On top of that, I have not seen a single company that uses Rust or Bevy for game development, as most of them use Unity or Unreal. While I can still put this on my resume, it may not be as impactful as a shader project would have been or creating a game in one of the more popular engines.