[WIP] [C+C] Customisable shoot em' up ships.

[Linaru]

Need some thoughts and ideas on how to go about this:

we are working on a shoot em' up game that will feature customisable player ships. as you progress through the game you will obtain new wings, weapon systems, cockpits engines and power cores.

the problem I am having is originally the ships where only supposed to be super simplistic styled, like 4 pixels.. but now that we want customisation we've decided to tweak it to a larger scale to show off all the different ship parts visually.

i have ended up with this which is sort of somewhere between the simplistic style and the scale we are going for:



it looks okay but could use more work, and Because of the way in which the parts separate there are some areas where adding detail will be hard.

any thoughts or ideas on how to make the ships look better / or how to better stitch them together?

[FRAWG]

What I would consider primarily is keeping the background and foreground elements separate. Use lower contrast elements for the ground and high contrast for the ships, projectiles, etc. One strategy that many shoot em ups use is making darker backgrounds (a lot of this may be due to space settings, but the design and the theming go hand and hand) and lighter ships, to further the separation. This can work in many other ways (dark vs light, saturated vs desaturated, complimentary colors, etc).

At the moment it's very difficult to pick out the ship in your mockup, and this is due to the value (light/dark) of the ship being very close to that of the ground, and the ground being very busy. For the background, focus more on larger areas of solid color, rather than small clusters of texture. It's easier on the eyes and makes scanning the scene for things like bullets, enemies, and yourself a lot easier.

[Decroded]

nice tiles but try keeping background layer separate from sprites especially for an action game:

- less contrast
- less saturation
- reduce detail by opting for larger smoother forms

there's nothing wrong with large flat areas of a single colour broken up with patches of minimal texture.
this actually looks better and more interesting than a page full of "detail" which flattens everything out.

[Linaru]

think there might of been some confusion as to what i was asking as responses where talking about the level?

done a little more on my example ship system:


so the idea of the system is to split the ships into wings, engine, weapons , power core and cockpit.
players can then mix and match parts to make their ships

but because of the way we are essentially splitting ships up i cant draw any details that go across those joins.

so this is making me unsure on how to improve the ships

[Pusty]

the first 2 look inverted to me lol
the the only thing I can criticize is the fact that the wings look like they are
on the bottom of the ships (not middle centered)
other then that I think they are fine

[Gil]

Here's a similar test I did a while back:



You can't just cut pieces out to make that look work. you need to think about volumes.

[Linaru]

Okay so we have had a rethink on vehicle assembly. instead of the weapons attaching between the power core and the wings we are making the wings bigger and having attachment points for weapons (the pink marked pixels) so weapons can be applied on a layer above the rest of the ship currently it looks a bit more like this:



im not really sure whats goingon with the engine , was trying to make it look like an angled view on the back of the ship

Edit : Gil posted his response just as i was posting mine XD

[Linaru]

taking your advice into consideration i have attempted to draw a more complete ship

[Joe]

Ok that's better but you need to consider the pixel tech now. Remove banding, clean up unnecessary noise. Use more contrast and spread your colors out more consistently.

[Decroded]

grey is not generally a good choice for sprites in an action game.