Wanted: Space backgrounds for "Space Rocks!"


bzar

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Hi,

I'm adding new asteroid themes to my game "Space Rocks!" (repo, thread) as shown in this post.

Now I need fitting backgrounds for those. I'm no artist and though I tried to make backgrounds matching the current one from the same raw image data (hubble telescope images) I couldn't get the quality to match. :(

The backgrounds have some criteria beyond aesthetic pleasantness when combined with specific asteroid types, mainly regarding contrast with the tiny asteroids in different parts of the image.

Post below if you'd like to help :)
 
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Idea: how to make an optional "backgrounds" folder to the appdata folder so we can include and test new backgrounds? Would speed up things alot imho, because I'm not into PND disassembling to include and test this ingame. ^^
 
dude!  NASA has a large archive of public domain images that are destined to appear in your game.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

I suggest you wget -r -np http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/   # or similar

I will do that, trawl through them, and suggest some.  And maybe make a torrent.

You could also try this legal torrent with just a few:  http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/6245375/77_NASA_Picture_of_the_Day_(2011)_Wallpapers_1600_X_1200

if you don't want to download / look through the archive.
 
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Idea: how to make an optional "backgrounds" folder to the appdata folder so we can include and test new backgrounds? Would speed up things alot imho, because I'm not into PND disassembling to include and test this ingame. ^^
Make a folder "img" in spacerocks appdata. Put a "background.png" file there.

dude!  NASA has a large archive of public domain images that are destined to appear in your game.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

I suggest you wget -r -np http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/   # or similar

I will do that, trawl through them, and suggest some.  And maybe make a torrent.

You could also try this legal torrent with just a few:  http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/6245375/77_NASA_Picture_of_the_Day_(2011)_Wallpapers_1600_X_1200

if you don't want to download / look through the archive.
Yup, already downloaded quite a few. Tried making backgrounds from them. The result sucked compared to the one I have (which is also a modified hubble image, from opengameart) :p

They need some work (noise removal, hue/saturation/lightness tweaking and stuff) to actually work as game backgrounds. Same for _wb_'s suggestion. The background needs to be smooth, low-frequency, not too dark, not too bright, hue-varied, and fitting to the asteroid graphics :)

EDIT: Oh, and not too many colors so it is visually associated to the background instead of fighting with the foreground sprites. Learned this from pixel art tutorials I read for wars: commando :)
 
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Make a folder "img" in spacerocks appdata. Put a "background.png" file there.
Cool, the coder takes care of everything, right? ^^
They need some work (noise removal, hue/saturation/lightness tweaking and stuff) to actually work as game backgrounds. Same for _wb_'s suggestion. The background needs to be smooth, low-frequency, not too dark, not too bright, hue-varied, and fitting to the asteroid graphics :)

EDIT: Oh, and not too many colors so it is visually associated to the background instead of fighting with the foreground sprites. Learned this from pixel art tutorials I read for wars: commando :)
Sounds like music to me. :D I like to work with reduced colour palette, makes much things more easy. I basicly did all of that what you've mentioned also for my Wars-Theme. Lack of Pixel-Art Skills forced me to use pix and renders I did to get some decend look. Try&Error mostly but it can work pretty well. :)
 
Cool, the coder takes care of everything, right? ^^
Well he just know how the system works. That's where his current background is inside the PND. the way pnds works make it so your file will just have precedence hidding the one in the PND. Ultimatly a coder is lazy :D
 
This is a very nice feature of the PND system. It tends to give you easy modability for free, and in a nice way too - if you mess up, you just remove (or move) the appdata dir and everything is back to normal.
 
Are the ship and asteroids also pngs with alpha support?


In this case I would have a go at completely retheming a level ;)
 
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Here are two files:

background.png

asteroids.png
 
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mcobit: Still thinking about how to use this special theme. The ideas we discussed are still the best I've come up with. It's a bit too different from the rest of the style to be just another random level :)
 
They need some work (noise removal, hue/saturation/lightness tweaking and stuff) to actually work as game backgrounds. Same for _wb_'s suggestion. The background needs to be smooth, low-frequency, not too dark, not too bright, hue-varied, and fitting to the asteroid graphics :)

EDIT: Oh, and not too many colors so it is visually associated to the background instead of fighting with the foreground sprites.
There are I guess thousands of beautiful space backdrops in the APoTD archives.

It might take a little work to adjust the color gamut, if that's the word, you can do that.

You would have to edit them anyway, to scale and crop to 800x480.

You could make an automatic background adjuster program, if don't want to do it by hand...  easier than writing a game.

Looking forward to the new 1GB space rocks PND with thousands of space scenes :)
 
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This is probably obvious and might have been mentioned before but:

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/

for a massive collection of deep space images from the Hubble Telescope, i believe they are public domain, surely you can find at least some images here that suit your needs in terms of palette requirements/contrast with gamesprites.

Possibly unsuitable but this is a shot of Pandora's Cluster, it might be cool if you could use it (for obvious reasons)

10007096394_51ecb48af5_z.jpg
 
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The ones sswam suggested (and I before that in the main SR thread) are hubble images, as is the current background as well. The main problem is post-processing those to work well as game backgrounds. That site seems to have some stuff done to the images, I'll have to look closer to see if they're easier to make into something suitable.
 
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