Moon... oh boy!

That's what I voted for, so I'm to blame. Didn't see the movie so I'll be making something about the Moon, you know the big rock in the sky.
The easy way would be to make some sort of moon landing game, maybe a side-scrolling, fly-a-lander thing? Well I like easy.
But maybe a little twist would be good? I'm gonna keep it a 2D-in-3D but instead of moving up or sideways, I'll put the lander on a helix, a 3d spiral.

The mission for today - find/make assets. I'll need:
-a moon (duh!) 
-a lander model
-some asteroids
-sounds
-music

The lander will be the tricky part, I'll look a NASA blueprint or photo reference and build the model myself.

Got a prototype working and some assets done. Bad news is that the game seems lame. No fun at all. A day and a half down the drain, back to the drawing board. At least the assets can be reused. Got some nice asteroids with LODs, a lander, a space-box (like a sky-box, but in space) and some sounds.

The new idea is to make in 3d, with the lander driven by simplified Newton physics, or a Chi-Ting version of it. I don't think I'm going to make the landing part, just navigating via a asteroid field (there's no asteroid field near the Moon? so what? there could be...)

Should post some fancy screenshots but I'll do it tomorrow. Really. Trust me.     

In his game You get to pilot a futuristic spaceship in an asteroid filed between the Moon and Earth. If you’re asking why is there a asteroid field between the Moon and Earth… well, it’s complicated and it’s the future after all – a lot of things could happen.

 

Your goal is to make it across the asteroid field as fast as you can without running out of fuel. A set of ‘gates’ and some ‘green flying things’ will mark the way.

Move your mouse to rotate the camera and the mouse-wheel to zoom in and out.

The left mouse button is there to fire up the engines and the right mouse button for reverse thrust.

Use W-S-A-D keys to rotate your spaceship, but keep in mind that the direction you actually movie will only change when the engines are on!

In the top left corner of the screen you will see a timer, the faster you can get to the other side of the field the better (try to beat 3 minutes!)

In the lower left corner there’s the fuel gauge (a set of lines), when all the lines are faded you will run out of fuel and most likely crash. Next to it you will find a display showing your current speed.

 

Refer to the config.txt file for all the configuration options.

 

You will probably need a ‘modern’ computer to run this, I didn’t make all the needed optimalisations duo to lack of time and a change of concept around day #3.

 

To run the sourcecode you will need the Panda3D SDK: http://www.panda3d.org/download.php?sdk&version=1.8.1

 

When running the binary for the first time you may (or may not) need a internet connection, to download some engine components.

 

When running from the multiplatform p3d file you will need the Panda3D runtime installed:

http://www.panda3d.org/download.php?runtime

 

The music is by Mathew Pablo: http://www.matthewpablo.com/

The voice is based on the Google Voice: http://ctrlq.org/listen/