Helpful Blender Shortcuts For Beginners

When I first started using Blender I remember the interface put my off for quite a while but after getting some practice in and learning some helpful skills and shortcuts in the process I can now work through creating things pretty swiftly and efficiently.

Blender is a very keyboard based program, most of the functions can be accessed via keyboard shortcuts which saves time and makes the program a lot easier to use. Below are a series of key combinations that will make using Blender a lot smoother and may even boost the speed at which you create models.

Shift + A

The first shortcut might be one you already know of but I thought it would still be a good one to include. Pressing Shift + A when you have  your cursor in the 3D view to add one of the basic objects to the scene. 

1,3,7 Numpad Keys

When you have an object in the scene you can use some of the keys on the number pad to view the object from different angles. Pressing the numbers 1,3 and 7 will change the angle that you are viewing the object from. 1 will 

Shift + Right Click

Using Shift + RIght Click you can select and manipulate multiple objects in the scene. With all of these objects selected you can rotate,scale and move all of the objects at the same time. You can also add quick effects to these objects as well as add keyframes in animations and lots more.

Shift + J 

Shift + J combines the data of each of the objects so that Blender recognizes them as one complete object. With all of the objects joined together you can edit them at the same time 

P

After combining the objects together you might want to separate the objects again. If you select the whole object whilst in Edit Mode and press P, this will separate the selected object from the currently selected object. With this you can now edit this object separately. 

Score Attack Astronaut Devblog

Over the past couple of days I've been working on my astronaut game and so far everything's going a lot smoother than I ever expected it to! So far I've managed to get the players movement and shooting mechanics all set up and have a working random spawn system for the falling debris and the enemies. 

As  you can see in the preview above there are a couple of placeholder graphics mostly in the form of the giant cubes that fall from above, these cubes will be replaced in the future with things like meteorites and shooting stars, you may also have noticed that the player only faces in one direction regardless of the direction they're moving in. Changing the direction that the player faces is one of the next main things I want to get around to fixing as well as animations for each of the enemies. 

So far I only have 1 enemy type in the game in the form of a simple orange blob (Shown below) but by the time the game is finished I aim to have at least 3 enemies built in. The enemy below may seem a little simple, this is because i want my game to appeal to everyone so I chose to go with a simple cartoon style alien because its the sort of thing that most people will be familiar with. 

Having multiple different enemies in my game will add some variety so the player isn't seeing the same thing over and over again. As well as just having extra enemies in my game I intend to make it so that they take between 1-3 shots to kill to add a little bit of extra variety to the game. 

With the basics of the main mechanics set up I also created a script to control other properties of the game, this script destroys any aliens or bullets that go off of the edge of the screen which stops the game from lagging out or slowing down. This script also controls the games timer which works as a visual indicator to show the player how much game time they have left. The only other mechanic I really need to set up is some way to add a value to the score each time an enemy is destroyed and then the game will be in a playable (yet super rough) state. 

If everything continues to progress as well as it has been a rough playable version of the game should be ready in the next couple of months on itch.io . After that I plan to keep working on the game to polish it and iron out any bugs then work on getting the game working on a mobile device. I'll try to keep updating this regularly for anyone who's actually interested :P but  other wise keep an eye on my Twitter (@markimo2) for other updates.