Milestone 1

Reaching milestone 1 has been a great accomplishment - we have part of our tutorial level laid out, along with some working mechanics. I am thrilled to see things being put together!

That being said, reaching the milestone came with its own set of complications, along with lessons learned. First off, our team had trouble figuring out the best way to share the project among one another. We settled for Unity's Collaborate feature, which is a godsend. It allows each of us to edit the project, and publish the edits we made so the other members can download these changes. One good thing to point out - if at some point, something in the project went awry, we can go back to a previous version of the project and work from there.

Secondly, what gave me a bad headache was scaling the size of the models from Maya into Unity. The odd thing about Unity - when a model is first imported, it doesn't keep the original scale of 1 for the model - instead it has decimals like 0.02365. This was not good for coding purposes - we need the whole number 1. I ended up having to create brand new models from scratch which was time consuming, but overall they were an improvement. As we got ready to present Milestone 1 to the professor, we realized the issues with scaling wasn't actually solved, which frustrated me. The professor was really helpful - she pointed out the option in Maya that allows us to freeze transformations, which resets the values of the model back to 1, after making size changes. Realizing this, it was only a matter of resizing the models in Maya and reimporting them into Unity. I can honestly say how relieved I am to have learned this lesson before things got out of hand.

That being said, Milestone 1 was an eye opener, and I am pretty confident in my team going forward. I am looking forward to reaching Milestone 2!