This past week was the midpoint of the term, and it was a hectic one. The positive side is that we got a lot of work done this week.
Lately, we have been focusing on tightening up the quality of our game, fixing bugs, and adding more levels. In particular, we’ve been experimenting with new multiplayer level experiences.
Ultimately, we had so many great ideas we decided to implement all of them. Here is what we came up with:
1 – Player 1 vs. Player 2 Split Screen
The idea behind this level is to have a way for 2 human players in the same room to play competitively against each other. It divides the play area in half, giving each player their own screen real estate. This is to allow the players to clearly see their own play area without getting any distractions from the other player.
2 – Player vs. Computer AI
The motivation behind this level is to let the player enjoy the full game experience, utilize the full screen to play, and have more bricks to break, while adding a competitive multiplayer component. This multiplayer component is controlled by an artificially intelligent computer to challenge the player. The AI player of this level controls balls, bricks, and a paddle that are transparent in the middle, and have a colorful glow on the outer edge. We call these the “Ghost Assets”. This design is to allow both human and AI assets to be visibly layered on top of each other on the game screen.
In this screenshot, some Ghost bricks and some normal bricks have been broken. You can easily distinguish between them. Also in this screenshot, the first player has lost all of their lives, so their paddle and ball have de-spawned from the game, leaving only the AI’s ball and paddle in play.
Conclusion
As of now, the Player vs. AI level has been created and integrated into the project. The only thing missing for the level is the actual AI component.
I do feel that we are slightly behind on the AI component, because it took us longer than expected to come up with a final prototype that we are comfortable with before we start adding the machine learning.
But, now is the time to start, and I feel that we still have enough time to make it happen and train it well.
As for the split level, we decided to remove the “Exit” button on the Main Menu, because we no longer need that button if we will be deploying this game to the Web. In place of the “Exit” button will be a new button to access the Player vs. Player split screen level.
You can check out our first deployment at: https://kenkoolio.github.io/ML-Breakout-Capstone/