Outer Space Shack - progress one month on

There has been less than a month since I started working on the Outer Space Shack project, a video game to build bases on the Moon or March with realistic current technology. A lot of this time has been learning Unity and Blender, which turned out to be quite easy thanks to all the great online tutorials. Here are the news you may be interested in.

Terrain Generation

The terrain of the game is automatically generated, with the Apollo 17 soft hills landscape taken as a model. Boulders and craters are also automatically generated. Right now, the terrain is 1x1km, I may experiment with larger terrains later. This means each game you play will have a different terrain, with different challenges.

Camera and Day / Night cycle

To play the game, the second thing I needed was a camera to move on the terrain. It now supports keyboard and mouse. Then, I added a day and night cycle. The difficulty was tuning the display at dawn and dusk, as long shadows are not so nice if you do not take care. Half the game will be played at night. I foresee that night will be the favourite for outside human activities, as there is less radiation around. So it needs to look nice, and cold, and lonely.

Building placement

This was a hard nut to crack, but it is almost OK now. Players build their base modularly (7 elements in night picture above). The buildings need to be placed according to certain rules (some buildings need to be adjacent...). It is now mostly working, even my 6-year old daughter can now build a functioning base. You can see a small animation here.

Next

Now that we have a terrain and can place buildings, the next step is sending rockets from earth. over the holidays, I plan to work on rocket selection, payload selection, a rocket landing pad on your base on the Moon, and an animation of the rocket arriving.