In terms of development, this week’s pace calmed down a little bit after the milestone of combining our prototypes. Most of our development efforts went to fixing bugs and improving the aesthetics of our game.
My teammates came up with some pretty creative solutions to the bugs we were facing. For example, whenever the ball gets stuck bouncing back and forth between the left and right walls, after 5 bounces there is an upward force added to the ball to kick it out of the loop.
This week, I also incorporated higher quality sprites that a teammate found for the ball, paddle, and bricks. These sprites have a vibrant color selection, and graphical details like a bold outline, bezels, and shadows.
I was also able to implement an architectural design that allows the game to progress to the next level, loading the new scene while unloading the old level’s scene. This is necessary because our architecture loads scenes additively.
We were also able to set up the ML-Agents environment for our project. There were setbacks and hurdles due to conflicting operating systems, but we were able to work through those and successfully integrate the libraries.
Our next major milestones will be to implement a machine learning model, build a human vs. AI level, and add more single player levels.
That’s it for this week’s check-in. See you in the next one.