Weekly Devlog 2

1. What were your goals for the past week?
   1. A digital prototype of the game's train engine moving on tracks and the player's control of the train.
   2. Bring the big picture into focus.
2. Which of these goals have been accomplished?
   1. Asked in a game-design community for recommendations for low-poly tools, and got many recommendations. Looked through and identified the tools I'll be using: Unity with GBCamera, and either Blender with SpryTile or PicoCAD (which I haven't tried yet). Blender + SpryTile has the added benefit of being free, though PicoCAD is only $6. There's also Blockbench, which seems fine, but more "voxelly."
   2. The big picture is becoming clearer to me - I have a short list of characters broad-strokes (just titles/roles) who the player will interact with. The player character has a name (Tye).
   3. After a very "guided" "playtest" I received positive feedback about the presentation of the player's POV camera and overall presentation and tone. This was encouraging, though I hope to have something more properly playtestable soon (something I can let the player truly explore without my operation).
   4. Bonus: I wasn't looking for sounds yet, but I found some promising, inexpensive SFX and ambient sound packs that I think will help solidify the illusion. I haven't purchased them yet, but they're on sale currently, so I should probably not wait too long.
3. What are the team's goals for next week?
   1. Have a drivable train object that a player can ride and control and look out the windows of (even if there's nothing to look at yet).
4. What will you need to learn to accomplish these goals?
   1. Same things as last week I guess. How to make an object move around in Unity, how to make that object be something that moves the player if they're standing on/in it. Click and drag controls. (How am I doing look-direction if the mouse is a hand? Hm... try a button, like left-shift, to switch the mouse between mouselook and mouse-pointer-interactor.

A pickup truck was the tutorial I found for Blockbench.