Game is coming along nicely! Spent quite a bit of time midweek working on this. I think my rough plan with it is to keep it as a main priority and as my main project for a few more weeks to get all the core systems and gameplay built out. After that I'll transition it to a more weekend / late evening hobby phase while I add all the smaller features and polish.
Project
Worked on a few things this week. The main feature I added was much better pathing and natural movement. Now, instead of clearly following a grid and A* path, the mobs take a more "natural" path towards their target. They also calculate their path based on the health of buildings so if, for example, there is a wall that's almost near destruction such that attacking it would be faster than attacking a full health wall on a more direct path, they will choose to attack the damaged wall. I think that the mob pathing is a very important part of this game so I was happy to spend some time really fine tuning it. I still need to figure out what a fun balance of mobs choosing to attack walls versus going around them would be. I added a parameter to their pathing that acts as a modifier to the weight of a path that goes through buildings. I think for it to be fun they should try to not destroy walls so that the player is incentivized and rewarded for creating better paths with their shapes that suit their towers and deck. Aside from this I added a few nice QOL upgrades and some visual upgrades. At this point however the codebase is growing large enough that LLMs aren't as helpful anymore. I'm very glad however that I set up my code in a way that is quite modularized and extensible however which means if I do want to use LLMs for changes I can just feed in the relevant files.
Math Academy
Diamond league is tough! People really seem to grind a lot here. I maintained my diamond league status however. Aiming to stay here. I think I did around 400XP this week.
ML Learning
Still working on Andrew Ng's courses. They're actually quite interesting and I like the way he breaks things down. I wouldn't say it's very rigorous and the "homeworks" / quizes are quite easy, but I'm still learning things and trying to Anki relevant concepts where I do learn something new.