Should I go for pixel art?

[Zed]

two things:
justified-aligned text doesn't really work in those little planet infos.
also, too many variations in font scale (note: scale, not size).

 

[tiagocc0]

Thanks for the feedback Zed, I will fix them =]

 

[Zed]

Thanks for the feedback Zed, I will fix them =]

no problem. it's looking great.

by the way, is the background a big static image?
something you could do to remove a bit of the, uh, staticness, is to add some twinkling stars, shooting comets, flickering auroras etc. It's hard to make space feel "alive" but I think these are details that could add quite a bit.

 

[tiagocc0]

I actually did an animation of shooting stars, but I removed it until I can make it not use so much cpu.
It makes some stars appear and disappear, some of them move others stay still.

 

[tiagocc0]

Here's a video I made to test the Fullscreen mode, it's very quick but it shows the animated background:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2012-12-26 09-27-31-34-1.m4v

 

[hoverdog]

looking good!

 

[tiagocc0]

looking good!

Thanks!

 

[tiagocc0]

Here's a video of me and my concept artist trying to make the background more interesting.
The background is just a picture from NASA, he will do a better one later:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2013-01-16 08-48-50-64-1.m4v

 

[eric__s]

Damn, digging that parallax. This game is looking really nice, although I think a pixel art nebula would probably look a little better and contrast less than a high res image.

tiagocc0, I haven't forgotten the Kickstarter advice you asked me. We were interviewed for a couple sites and newspapers about Kickstarter and the articles haven't come out yet - I want to wait until they have and sort of aggregate all the stuff we've written plus write about some stuff we were never asked. This will probably be toward the end of the month.

 

[tiagocc0]

Thanks! I will have Jalonso (pixel artist) to trasform it into pixel art later, but since it can be quite large it will probably take a long time to make, Danilo (concept artist) is already working on some better backgrounds to use.

No problem, now that will be something really interesting to read! Looking forward to it!

 

[Zed]

it looks great. the two layers are quite distinct however. maybe 3 layer parallax would give it more natural depth.

 

[tiagocc0]

As in a background plus 2 layers above or background plus 3 layers above?

 

[Zed]

well if the front layer moves 1:1 (input:reaction, whatever), and if you use 3 layers, it could look like

layer 1 - 1:1
layer 2 - 1:0.66
layer 3 - 1:0.33

I assume you have 2 now, one which is 1:1 and the other 1:0.5 or something.

 

[tiagocc0]

I have 3, but two of them are quite similar, a few tiny stars on a transparent background.
Layer 1 - Background moves really slow
Layer 2 - Stars, moves slowly
Layer 3 - Stars, moves 1:1

But I will change one of the stars so they are not too similar, and also change the background to be more consistent with the game design.
EDIT: I will also try to add some kind of animation, if I can make it lightweight enough.

 

[tiagocc0]

A tiny update, added another layer of stars, changed one of the layers of stars and made the background color a bit more dark.
Made a better quality video too:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/StarLifeBackgroundPlusAnimation.m4v

 

[Zed]

Looks better, but I would reduce the amount of blinking stars and perhaps only have it occurring in the back-most layer. I also think that the back-most layer should be almost static. I would also reduce flying debris/ships/comets and that stuff by half.

 

[tiagocc0]

Ok

 

[tiagocc0]

Here's two new videos, 800x600 and 1920x1080, the background opacity is a bit high because this is the video I'm sending to Danilo to show him how his two new backgrounds fit with the engine, I will probably set a bit lower opacity later.
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2013-01-18 20-41-31-64-1.mp4 (1920x1080)
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2013-01-18 20-44-23-22-1.mp4 (800x600)

I screwed big time, I have a high resolution monitor that I bought new and it was quite cheap, this is because the damn thing is purple hell. So I have to fix the color using my graphics card because the monitor alone isn't able to do that.
The problem is that the program I use to capture the movie was actually capturing it with my purple correction so it was kind of greenish. For me it looked alright, but on any other monitor is must look horrible.
So I disabled the correction to make this new videos, so it must look better now.

Now I need to finish some stars and then code, code, code. (need to finish, the bigger stars F A B O, red giants and then the flare stars)
These stars will look better after it's transformed into pixel art.

 

[Zed]

I know that in space, the size of a star isn't necessarily just it's distance to the eye, but it's looks a little weird that all the stars on the front layer are 1x1 pixel ones.

 

[tiagocc0]

I made them like that so they won't distract the player, I will try other sizes later.

 

[Zed]

tiagocc0
I played around with "space parallaxing" this morning. I found the best result to be planets on their entirely own layer, with 3 background layers. 1 at 0.8, 2 at 0.65, 3 at 0.35.

http://absum.se/codex/planets.exe
(arrows keys to fly around )

 

[tiagocc0]

Ow, that's great, I'm modifying it accordingly.
Such a tiny exe, did you make it with SDL?

 

[Zed]

Multimedia Fusion 2 Dev
http://www.clickteam.com/website/world/multimedia-fusion-2-developer

 

[tiagocc0]

Here it is:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2013-01-20 14-42-35-94-1.m4v

Change the stars order too so bigger stars appears on the front and one pixel stars on the back.

 

[Zed]

Here it is:
http://purpleorangegames.com/Videos/Sttc A2 2013-01-20 14-42-35-94-1.m4v

Change the stars order too so bigger stars appears on the front and one pixel stars on the back.

I have nothing more to say regarding the space background now.. I think it looks great