AI Opponent (Jan 31 2025)

First things first is that the bullet hell game is now released, you can play it right now. Adding art and flavor to enemies was hard, but even harder was coming up with a name. I gave up and just went with the bad name of Relentless Waves. I also put on the title screen that the enemies keep shooting after you defeat them, to make it crystal clear that it's intentional and not a bug.

I also started work on getting an AI done. It checks through every possible chain of decisions it could make, remembers which one has the best result, and then plays out the best one. To do this it also has to undo constantly when it's done with a chain, and needs to go back to a previous one. This was...very difficult. I spent days working on it and only just got it working a few hours ago. It's also slow, the game lags a lot when the AI is resolving everything, and it always feels like it's about to infinite loop and crash. And the game is still very simple, all it's doing is placing a troop in one of 5 rows. But at least it's making progress.

I also had 2 weird dreams this week. The first took place in Japan. I have no idea why, it just did. I was walking around on some school field trip, when suddenly I realized that I had won some art competition that I didn't even know I entered. Suddenly the field trip shifts to traveling towards the art competition to get my prize. While trying to enter, the mobile app I had to login to wasn't working, and I ended up spending a bunch of time standing outside. In the end I don't know if I ever got in or not, even though I supposedly won the show.

The second one was in an airport. While at passport check, for some reason the staff there were really interested in asking me about stuff. My notes say "philosophical questions" but I don't remember what those questions were. It went on for a really long time, until I eventually asked "and what is all this discussion for, why would my answers matter?" They responded with "I'm just curious, that's all." Then after I passed passport check, an alarm went off in the airport. My first though was that there was a fire in the airport and everyone had to evacuate, except that as I got to the exit of the airport, I saw people trying to get inside the airport. This baffled me, because why would people be trying to go inside of a burning airport? Then I realized that there was no fire, the alarm went off because there's been a zombie apocalypse, and the people outside are zombies.

And that's it for this week. The notes were pretty short this time because figuring that AI took so much time.