That looks like some sort of huge boss thing right out of one of my favorite shmups.
That's high praise coming from me, mind you.
Is this the sort of style the game as a whole will be using? Looks bloody excellent to me.
Makes me think of Darius, actually. Except that it's not shaped like some sort of fish, that series really had a thing for giant spaceship sea creatures.
Looking forward to seeing more!
Thanks Misery!
As far as styles go, I'm not sure. I think a specific style is not really set in stone, but that you like this is a good direction to look at.
Could you specify more about what about this you like, as far as 'style' goes?
And thanks everyone!
-Blue
Well the first thing that stands out is that this doesn't have the extremely overused "big metal battleship" style to it. I'm thinking of something like the ships in Battlestar Galactica, or even something like the Star Destroyers in Star Wars. Big, blocky, very "metallic" looking ships, usually a sort of gray color (or close to it), that even from a distance shows the surface of the ship as being made up of a gazillion square-ish metal plates covered in random funky bits that stick out all over. Anyone that's seen enough sci-fi space stuff probably knows what I mean by this style in a general sense outside of those two specific series. It's very prevalent.
And it's REALLY overused in games. I don't mean just the shmup genre (though that does go extremely overboard with these in certain games) but in a lot of space games of all sorts of genres, you get ships like that. The sort of thing that says "another huge capital ship in space". Cool as they may look they're often not actually very creative and tend to look very similar to one another. After as many games as I've played that for whatever reason involve combat ships in space, I'm soooooo tired of these designs. They're not very memorable to me anymore. And they're usually about as colorful as a brick.
The thing you've shown here doesn't even go near that type of design, which is great. There's an almost organic quality to it, yet not too much. The blue crystal bits add to this look, and also add some extra menace to it (and a big central ship, which this is, should look menacing in my opinion, it shouldn't look like something that runs and hides; that wouldn't exactly scream confidence, nope). It's got a dragon-ish shape to it but it doesn't go too far with that either. Even if the individual ship itself ends up not being all that strong, as the core unit it's still sort of representative of the fleet as a whole, so it should look impressive even if it's actual power is low.
And overall, it just stands out to me. It looks DIFFERENT than the norm that's used everywhere but without looking ridiculous. Stands out. And again, there's some actual color there. That's something that always catches my eye since so many games these days don't seem to know what colors even are.
