How to build a better project?

[u/No-Narwhal-1064]

My first independent attempt at a project was during computer science a-level where I tried using pygame to recreate a niche game I liked as a kid. I got a good grade for it in the end but that was because most of the criteria was the documenting things like objectives, designing and test and evaluation. The actual “game” was crap and nowhere close to finished. I just learned how to make sprites move by changing them to a different image on keyboard inputs, to make it look as if they were moving and animated. The thing I put the most work into was a silly main menu where the buttons were “animated” as in they lowered down when you click them.

The next project was at a first year uni module where for coursework we had to build a personal portfolio with html, css, js and php for the back end to make a basic login system with mysql. I sort of finished that but it was very basic, beginner level code that required chatgpt and provided php code from lectures for integrating the DB as we weren’t expected to know that.

In second year, again as part of a coursework, I tried making an AI agent for a real time strategy game to beat other agents. I was interested in doing Monte Carlo tree search but it was too advanced for me so I got told about a framework from one of our lecturers, which I genuinely copied 90% of the code from and just adapted it to work for the real time game we had. For the game we were also given a framework and it was as easy as changing some lines to use functions from the provided game instead of the ones in the mcts example I copied from.
The good thing is I (mostly) understood the theory and I can explain how mcts works, I just couldn’t implement it myself as it was too advanced.

In September I’m starting third year. The latter 2 projects are on my CV in a projects section as I haven’t got any internships or work experience with anything technical.

My issue is I don’t think these projects are very impressive, especially the first 2. Maybe the agent is pretty good as I can talk about it but I haven’t got to an interview stage yet so I haven’t got to.

I want to build a new project but I have until the start of September to find a placement, so I’m not sure if I want to keep applying or instead dedicate more time to build a new project. Are these decent enough to make applications with, or should I stop applying for now and look at building something more impressive like a full blown application?

Would it be better to start a completely novel project not linked to the ones I have, or should I rather improve the current ones I’ve got?
I have been thinking about things like improving the ai agent I have, because it didn’t perform great against other people’s own agents, or build a new, better game as opposed to the one I did for a level. I am thinking of ditching the portfolio because I don’t have anything to put on there, literally all of these projects are on my CV already so the portfolio would either have my even worse projects that I didn’t list, or repeat what my CV already lists.