Creating ship movement and engine animation

This is the first part of Asteroids game series which we will create in Blender Game Engine. In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to move an object with keyboard keys
• How to play a simple mesh animation in Game Engine
• How to animate an object using script in python

When you want to start creating games you have to realize, that you can't start with MMORPG like World of Warcraft. I was talking with a few developers and read a lot of articles about game development and I can tell you: If you want to be really good, start with small steps first. Try to create a few simpler games, than move to adventure, FPS, RPG, strategy and MMORPG should be the last game genre you will create. The reason for that is simple. The more you get involved into designing games and writing code (forgive me I'm not mentioning modeling, texturing, rigging and animation :-D) you will see how complex such a game can be. I was thinking about the best start of a series of tutorials about creating a simple game and here we go. I finally created a tutorial about basic movement. More parts will come. I can promiss you that right now I was scripting even a particle system for BGE and believe me I read lots of comments on blenderartists forum about people complaining about the missing particle system in BGE. But we will see when we will get to this complex stuff :). So, here is the starter file for this tutorial:

Here is the rock texture from cgtextures.com:

http://cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=8661

And enjoy the tutorial:

If you've got any questions you can post a comment below and I will be glad to answer them :).