Welcome to the first post of our new category: Experiments! As we spend all this time learning new software, code, techniques, etc., we’ve realized there are quite a few things worth showing off; but that aren’t always tutorial-worthy. This is the category where they will land. Hopefully these posts will give you some inspiration, some new techniques you would like to look into or even just some cool things to look at. We hope you enjoy…
This past week, we began experimenting with new ways to create realistic space scenes in Starlight Arcade. This led us to the Starfield Tutorial for GIMP, by ArcherBlack, on deviantart.com. The tutorial is worth checking out. It provides a lot of helpful insight into how you can make some realistic space scenes, complete with step-by-step screenshots. Even on our first try, we came up with the above scene in roughly half an hour.
Not too bad, we think; but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Minus the larger stars, this could easily be turned into a tiled background. We could even think of a way to potentially make the colored portion of the star field change color via C# in-game.
This was a pretty cool thought and a pretty cool first space scene. However, the idea for Starlight Arcade is to build a continuously changing game. We may start with a tiled background; but, over time, the idea would be to create a system of changing celestial objects that scroll down the screen. We may even dip into procedural generation.
We did get a decent layer of larger star particles out of this experiment, though. You might see those in V1.3. Stay tuned!
-Lvl12Games