How do you make space interesting to look at from a map/level point of view.
Be it in 3d or 2d (I myself am working in 2d but most ideas can be adapted) I can’t think of many ways to make a battle in space seem attractive. Space itself being a large expanse of nothingness.
The easy way to make it look visually appealing of course is to put a planet in the background, but that doesn’t always work from a story telling point of view, seems a little convenient to have every battle take place in shot of a planet, and also not having that planet react in some way.
Is this a case of just having to accept that space is what it is and you can’t change that? Or does anyone have any ideas or examples of ways to make space visually appealing? Or if you are a fan of sci-fi games or art are you fine with space just being a darkness full of stars, is that what you go in to a game expecting?
My assumption / preference is to have something to look at.
Nebula effects are pretty common (possibly to the point of wearing out their welcome). I’ve done a few distant galaxies and a black hole. Subtle movement helps. In our game we’re doing various mixtures of planets and moons, planets with belts, moons with chunks out of them, planets with visible (pinpoint) orbital traffic, etc. We aren’t doing asteroid fields but that’s certainly common, too.
Super easy with skybox-style camera layering and literally just a few lines of code for movement. Minimal effort and processing cost.
Either is fine to me. Seems more like a subjective style thing. In terms of gameplay, having a less “noisy” background could be beneficial to more easily see where everything is, but of course it doesn’t necessarily make for the most exciting screenshots.
I’m doing a space game that’s mostly busy/noisy skyboxes, plus some planets/asteroids/large space stations, but I have black empty space in some areas too. So I kind of punted and did both.
Something else to consider, depending on how “active” the game is would be the particle effects of the weapons, shields, explosions, and all that. It they’re really large, colorful, plentiful, and dynamic, you may not want your background competing with all that.
As MasterFrog said, ignore realism. In reality, space isn’t a lot of fun unless you’re looking down on something interesting. If you were really in deep space you’d probably go mad from boredom.
My favourite space environments are Homeworld and Everspace. They capture 2 different but very characteristic ways of making space feel fantastic.
Homeworld - Making space feel like flying in a heavenly atmosphere:
The player absolutely needs a reference point no matter where the ship is pointing. A nebula that encircles the player on the horizontal plane for example, or the way that objects are placed in the scene as in the pic above^^;
Forget about realistic distances between asteroids;
Particles and clouds whizzing past to give a sense of speed;
Preferably a large body of some kind in the far distance, to give a sense of awe - my favourite being the Homeworld style huge space structure:
Basically the idea is to take the feeling of a forest, or a city, or something like that, abstract it into something contextual and totally forget about practicality or realism.
google “space” i think there are alot of interesting things when looking into space, especially considering that we see more from space than what we see from earth due to lack of atmosphere
but also, most of those images, if not photoshopped are usually long time “shots” to gather as much light as possible, which is making those really awesome pictures
or look for “birth clouds” cradle of stars
Though I haven’t got to filling out the scenes quite so much yet, as others have said, Nebulae can add a lot to a space scene. If you are going for a realism look, what I have personally done, is kept the background mostly pitch black… with stars of varying sizes and colors (cool blues and yellows, and whites in between). Subtle nebulae with little splashes of colour to brighten up the backdrop - but very subtle (and not so sudden/plopped in), weak colors that are close to black, will help it to feel empty, but also detailed.
Something else you could play with is the lighting. If a scene is too well lit, things in it will pop from the background. Especially if you’re using a white light, you could consider lowering the intensity, and shifting the color to a warm blue or cool yellow, so that the light appears in the same color it would from a sun.
Depending on the scale/location of the game, you could also do something similar to FTL, with paralax ships, debris, asteroids etc in the background. In my opinion, some of these effects were a little too much (especially the density of the Asteroid fields), but similar methods could work well.
I personally would enjoy a mostly empty/dark/small bright stars/no ambient light space experience. But it is a very fine line to walk between ‘realism’ and ‘articstic creativity’. In fact, it would be fair that the entire genre is a fine line to walk between realism and X.
Yep. That might probably be almost true, well,…to a certain extent.
Believe it or not, space is kinda like a super large city.
Some parts of a city, will have lots of stuff. Other parts, will have less
or near to nothing in that region.
So, like a super sized city, it’s really according, to what region of space,
you’re travelling too.
Aye dudes.
Check out the E3 2017 trailer, for Beyond Good and Evil 2.
The one with the talking monkey, with the mecha controlled hand.
The spacey parts look really interesting.
It kinda adds more creative ideas, to the pics that Billy4184 posted earlier.
And to the info, the others posted here as well.
i think there are alot of interesting things when looking into space, especially considering that we see more from space than what we see from earth due to lack of atmosphere 
