so I currently have a pretty good working prototype for my top down space shooter I am creating. Im running into a little bit of a visual hurdle, im not too sure how im going to make my visuals better I want to have the ship which is currently based of the character class flying through space with stars, fog and nebulas. As of currently I am using a Box flattened with a skybox texture applied to it. How should I go about creating a realistic atmosphere that my ship can fly around? Here’s my current progress as of now
Even though it’s a top down game it doesn’t mean you can’t use the full power of 3d to create a proper fleshed out map for your game, I would start with making your sky a sphere instead of using a plane and then just start placing asteroid meshes and such in 3d but make sure that if you don’t want them colliding that you keep them away from your ship on the z plane. That would allow you to have some really cool parallax effects with asteroids appearing in front of your ship and such. From there, just work on implementing nebulae and such, it would probably be a good idea to model your spaceship in 3d also, then you can have lighting across the level which will make a huge difference with readability.
Yeah, you could also use particle effects for fog and stuff.
If for some reason you want to keep your ship 2D but also have lighting, you can use a normal map, though if you want anything complicated that still involves modeling it in 3D.
Also be careful with your contrast. Right now the background has really high contrast and it’s hard to see the ship. You could tone down the background or make the ship a bright color maybe.
