If I have learned anything, it is that I am not a 3D artist. Still, I am happy with my progress in Blender, and I think I am at the point where I can start exporting game assets and move on to programming. I will keep learning and practicing with Blender, and will probably replace all of the models in the months leading up to release. 

I am really happy with how my ships are turning out. There will only be one "theme" for how ships look for now, and it will be boxy, but I think it will work. To be honest, this is far more detailed than I really need for a strategy game, but it has gotten me thinking about cut-scenes, menu decor, and perhaps replay video for fleet combat.

Up Next... 

The next thing to learn is menus. I need to learn how Unity handles menus, how I can build them, add code to make them work, and add the decorations and polish that allows them to really shine. I have played games with ugly or minimum-effort menus, and they are always a disappointment, so I plan to have the best possible menus and UI elements I can manage. This means starting with menu design now, and iterating and upgrading the menus constantly over the next year. 

I am going to find a professional for official game artwork, but I needed something to work as a place holder. I thought I would like this look, but for some reason it gives me a "spaghetti western" feel. This non-functional menu is displayed in Unity, but it still took me quite a while to figure out how to create buttons, add text to them, line them up on screen... even setting a font was kind of difficult and non-intuitive for me. 

I also need to figure out a colour-scheme and specific fonts.

Unity Menus are Complicated

In my day job, I am a programmer who does web-development, and in that world the interface (HTML) is generated by code or contains hooks that I can reference from code. For example, a form will have several text fields and a submit button, and code can be triggered when the button is clicked to save the data entered into the form. 

In Unity, programming feels like an after thought. I create the menu by adding button objects to the canvas, and text objects to the buttons to display the text using font objects that provide the "styling". The code is in a C# script that gets dragged to one of the objects in the menu (or within the scene), then that object has access to that code. In my case, I would add the code to the menu container object. Then, the container gets dragged onto each of the buttons inside it, giving those buttons access to the same code. Then in each button object, functions can be selected, custom data passed, etc. 

Still, I am making some progress by dedicating an hour or two in the morning to this project. So far, that has mainly been with Blender, but I am putting more time in Unity now.