Pixel art principles in High res graphics?

[Facet]

I mean something like this maybe (obv. photo collage); going much darker in the background with some quite abstract cooler-tinged space dust and cranking up the contrast/colour of the interactive elements for much pop .

Sweet improvements of the player-ship already, although for a small-looking ship I don't see any evidence of a cockpit; is it unmanned?

[Phlakes]

I mean something like this maybe (obv. photo collage); going much darker in the background with some quite abstract cooler-tinged space dust and cranking up the contrast/colour of the interactive elements for much pop .

I'm really getting the depth in that edit. The original feels like it could be a couple feet in front of a painting of space, this makes it feel much more open and natural.

[Seiseki]

Hm, yeah, that actually works and makes it much more interesting.
Now if only I could learn to draw abstract soft shapes like that..

As for the ship, I didn't include a cockpit because when I first tried it on the first ship it looked kinda lame.
And now I've grown attached to the all metal look. Perhaps I'll add some kind of hatch or end up having a cockpit anyways. I do have a few ideas how it could look.

Phlakes, I'm not that worried about depth though. We're gonna have 3-4 layers of junk floating around at various depths which will give you a pretty extreme sense of depth (hopefully).
But it doesn't hurt to give it even more depth through the background, although I'm not sure how much of it you'll be able to see.

[Facet]

If you spammed some textural brush (perhaps from the standard charcoal set in illustrator) low opacity & really big so that it overlapped a lot you might get a nice abstract cloud-thing.

We're gonna have 3-4 layers of junk floating around at various depths which will give you a pretty extreme sense of depth

The depth thing was a concern of mine too; better unfathomable cosmological depth than non-interactive copies of foreground stuff.

[Grimsane]

I think from a design point of view you need to keep a happy balance when you tackle the backgrounds, if you are going to use some really intense galactic backgrounds I'd advise to keep it a bit duller (darker and desaturated) than the source

examples of games using tonal and vibrancy control (darkening and desaturating, essentially dulling it into the background) they usually tend to keep one particular colour tone per background and some use screen filters to give the impression of the light from the galaxies reaching the players immediate surroundings, the first one is a graphic mod and is a tad on the intense side
this this this

and examples of games that have really intensely saturated galaxy backgrounds ( arguably not differing to far from reality)
this this this

don't know about you but I find over saturated galaxies to look kinda cheap and eye hurtingly vibrant. another thing to add is that the games I have tried that have subdued galaxies have the benefit of being in 3D and some of them do have amazing and beautiful vibrant and vivid galaxy sections but they are strategically located in directions you barely ever look during gameplay even dog fights usually get fought on a relatively strict plane, so they never get in the way of gameplay.

I think you want it to be subtle to avoid the background grabbing equal or more attention to the foreground, even facet's example kinda draws your attention a bit more than you might want, just editing Facet's here is to some degree how much I'd attempt to pacify it. because you need to keep the main focus and a consistent level of separation on your play field, and sometimes It's incredibly hard to focus on enemy ships when the background is taking up so much of your visual attention. your posted mockup was sufficient in that regard, but yeah if you wanted a more visually interesting BG that would be my advice

I like you're designs so far and that latest space ship looks pretty baddass like the space ship equivalent of a Harley Davidson, so is it going to be strictly 1 player ship? upgrading and or getting new ships is always cool  and function wise the middle ship isn't too bad, in space there is no drag so stream lining them isn't an issue

[Seiseki]

Thanks, I'm currently thinking about having backgrounds like in this game, but with black and a tiny touch of color.
Having the background quite smooth and the foreground stuff sharp and highlighted will keep things nicely separated.
The scrap floating around in the parallax are quite low contrast already and their outlines are dark gray instead of black like the foreground stuff.

Also, there will be several ships with different abilities and weapons. This is just the first one.

Something I've been playing around with today, after finding the photoshop 3D functions, is this:



Not exactly sure what it will be used for, if it will be used at all.
But it does look cool
(it's a bit off-center though, which makes me feel nauseous  )

[Grimsane]

sounds good, would like to see it in action 

it's a bit off-center though, which makes me feel nauseous

haha thought that was intentional, looks more natural in a zero G setting, it might look too artificial and dull if it was a perfectly centred rotation, it looks quite good,

well what it hints at is a crate that can be blasted into debris to dispense repair objects of some description, the equivalent to health for your ship? looking really crisp too, I think you'll have to do a few more elements in that 3D style to make it look cohesive and not stand out on its own though

can you map alpha to the cube? or use other primitives, I think if you make all the faces bar one transparent and then draw a piece of space debris on one and generate another animation or just use a plane... you might have an interesting 3D space debris that'll probably look cool as ambience if the animation is slow hope you get what I mean

[rikfuzz]

Something I've been playing around with today, after finding the photoshop 3D functions, is this:



Not exactly sure what it will be used for, if it will be used at all.
But it does look cool
(it's a bit off-center though, which makes me feel nauseous  )

There's a lot of perspective..  I'd probably tone it down if it's possible in PS, just because the game view is from quite far away, but the box is acting as if it's quite close to the viewer. 

[Seiseki]

Hm, I know very little about 3D..
How would the perspective change if it's further away? I agree it's very in-your-face, but I assumed that was because of the size.

And yes, throwing that box in there would just be out of place.
That's why I can't really find a use for it at the moment.

[rikfuzz]

Article is probably overkill, but the pictures are pretty self explanatory.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography)