Space Ship

That’s right, a space ship, well sort of. I’m no graphics designer or modeler which will become apparent as you see my work, however I have put together a prototype ship in Unity just to use for testing purposes. I will be using this ship as the controller, or more specifically the object to be controlled by the player, using the Leap Motion sensor.

See like I said nothing special, however its early days and after all this is just a prototype. What I will be doing is next is creating a script that will allow me to use 2 hands to try and fly this module around the air space.

Design Ideas

Following on from the previous post, I will begin to blog some ideas to what the game purpose, mechanics and graphics will be like. So the purpose, well like I said before a flying game in which the player controls some sort of aircraft or space ship would be awesome. As the player can use both hands to simulate the angle and direction of the craft I feel this would fit quite well. The aim I think could be either to destroy a variety of enemies or objects along a given path, or race through a number of portals/checkpoints in  given period of time etc.

Mechanics: well flying using your hands to control like I just mentioned, however it would awesome if you could also fire with your hands. I’m not sure if this combination can be achieved but I will try and turn this to a reality.

Graphics: Or theme, well i’m no graphic designer or 3D modeler, so the simpler the better in my eyes. Even though some of the best games ever made have had a unique style of graphics and pulled it off well so why can’t I? I will no doubt be using cubes in unity and other shapes but I would like to keep to a ‘blocky’ world so that it appears to follow a style through out the play  space.  I think the setting would have to be some sort of space world, planet or whatever that fits nicely to the space ship feel.

Next thing is to begin trying to get a working flying object in Unity!

Leap & Unity 4 SDK

I will be using Unity as the development tool for this project, so first things first I would have to install Leap Motion SDK to Unity so I can begin using it. This was no problem despite using the free version of Unity (rather than the pro version).

The next thing I did was to download leap motions own demo pack for unity, in which they ‘showed off’ some of the games they built using the Leap Motion device. Here are a couple of images they provide to show the games they have made:

Bowling Demo

Driving Demo

Flying Demo

Quad Bike Demo

Shooting Demo

I fell in love with the flying demo and saw the potential to this and how this could be improved to basically make a fun, thrilling and all round exciting game! The next step for me was to think how could make a flying controller in to a game!

Beginning with Leap Motion!

Time for another Game Development assignment, and this is one to be very interesting indeed! I have got my hands on a device called Leap Motion, and will be using this as the basis for a new fully interactive game to play test and demo for this module of work.

For those who are new to Leap Motion and what it is then checkout the following link: https://www.leapmotion.com/ 

Now I must begin to try and understand the capabilities and the market for this technology, so that I can create a successful and exciting new game. First things first, I need to take a look at some of the existing games out there for Leap Motion so I can get some idea in which direction I can head before I begin development.