Need Ideas for Space Game.

Hey Guys,
I am making a game for my APCS AB final. My game is a top-down space ship game. Most of the game focuses on interaction between you and the ship. The player can do things like board ships, fight, dock with stations, and so forth. But another part of my game is flying the ship around in space. I am having a hard time figuring out the connection between the two. Like I know I want my "Pilot" to go to the flight control system be able to fly the ship in 3d space. I was thinking that I would have two different scenes: one is the ship model in space moving around, the other would be the interior of the ship and the interior of anything else it docked with. But I have no idea how to implement this. So far I have movement inside my ship. Any Ideas?

 

im new to making games but i have a good imagination i actually downloaded a space ship off the asset store and i think if we worked together we could have a good game. but i was thinking you could make a game where you have to control the ship and engage in ship to ship combat and when you get off on certain planets then you have to fight the "space pirates" like a fps game with laser guns.

 

My first idea is maybe you could make a "lid" to the ship, which is not visible when you're inside the ship top-down, and when in control of the ship zoom the camera out "into space" and put the lid on top, hiding/culling the interior.
As to how to approach your idea of scene switching, you could have a persistant game management object that shares data between scenes, then the rest is up to your script initialization. I personally think my first idea would be easier to implement though. Hope this helps!

 

That sounds like a really cool idea. I would start with prototyping both environments individually and then looking for possible connections. Is the movement inside the ship happening with a first person character or is it "top-down"?

 

How often do you switch between them? Because you can also do a lot with layers, in terms of making layers that don't collide with each other and don't appear on camera based on the layer mask.