Cycle 2 Week 2

The second week for Lunar Lander has passed and our team has made progress. Blake created a model for one the landers which has given something more than unity primitives to work with. Over the weekend, I created the input manager which is able to access the inputs of a given joystick based off an identification number on the landers script. This gave the team a lot to go on when we met on Monday, as I moved onto organising the scene transitions. One aspect of a game loop I’ve been looking to learn was loading screens. After a couple of google searches, I found out that I was looking for Asynchronous Loading, which apparently loads a scene separate to the active one without disturbing it.

As one of the criteria for the assignment, everyone has to make at least one 3D model. We thought that we should all make a lander each, so we have our own personalized lander to playtest with. During pre-production, we decided that we were going for a voxel-based art style (very similar to Crossy Road). Our class is starting to learn Maya, a 3D modelling program that is extremely useful for our projects. However, due to some unknown reason I was unable to obtain an educational licence for Maya, which restricted me to only using the application during class. This led me to search for other programs that could make the lander, which led me to MagicaVoxel which exclusively deals with creating voxel-styled models. It was extremely easy to learn and in not too much time I was able to create a 3D rendition of the lander from the original game.