Julian's Blog

April 21st - April 27th

Had a bit of a short week as I had friends in town on Monday and on Tuesday I took a trip up to Providence to check out Brown. I've pretty much come to the decision to enroll in NYU Courant for my MSCS, which I was a bit nervous about because of the rigor of the program and the competition, but I think it's the right choice. My math is slightly behind where it needs to be, but I'm planning to get that up to speed before I enroll in September and also try my best to pre-learn as much of the material as possible so I can do better in classes and hopefully secure a research position there.

I made some progress on my game, but starting from next week I plan to switch my project focus, so this week I'm planning to really try to build out a lot more of the core systems that will take a lot of time and thinking so that I can work on more bite sized pieces in the background in the upcoming weeks.

Project

Made a lot of progress in terms of planning out exactly how the game should work. I also integrated a new map view where the player can move around on a hex grid. I'm thinking that, in order to make it more fun and add more combo potential, I'm going to have the cards / towers have two components. One that specifies how the tower shoots, so it could be a standard projectile, maybe an AOE etc. the other will specify the effect of the projectile, damage, slow etc. Here's a quick look at the map system. It cuts back and forth between map, combat, shop, rewards and dynamically generates the map.

Math Academy

This is going well but I might need to pick up the pace on this if I want to have everything finished by the time I enroll in September.

Screenshot 2025-04-28 at 12

ML Learning

Still on Andrew Ng's Advanced Learning Algorithms course. Went a bit deeper into backprop, similar to what Karpathy covered in his micrograd course.