Ten new screenshots, and how the explosions ended up looking like this

As of today the store page opens on ten new screenshots. They come from a couple of evenings of running battles with the HUD off, parking the camera on a capital ship, and waiting for something big to blow up next to it. I like them more than anything I have shot for the game so far, so I want to say a bit about where the look came from and then ask you what you think.

Space is a black canvas. Early on that was the whole problem. Two grey ships trading grey lines over nothing does not read as a battle, it reads as a diagram. The way out, slowly, was to treat everything bright in the game as paint on that canvas. Engine plumes, tracer streams, shield hits, the corona around an eclipse, the jet coming off a quasar, and above all the explosions. If it gives off light, it goes through the same glow pass, and that pass is tuned so the light bleeds into the black around it instead of sitting on top like a sticker.

Three versions of an explosion

The explosions took the longest.

The first was a round pop. A circle grew, went orange, faded. Same circle for a fighter and for a dreadnought. It read as an arcade token.

The second replaced the circle with sprite sheets that the game paints for itself when it starts: five frames for the small blasts and seven big 512-pixel frames for capital ships, six variants of each, and every fireball picks its own so no two look alike. Better, but they still felt pasted on top of the scene.

The third step was the light. A bloom pass over the whole scene, light spilling from each blast onto nearby hulls and dust, and for capital ships a staged finale: an implosion gasp first, then an eruption shaped by the hull's own silhouette, then secondaries, hull plates and shockwave rings. Look at the first screenshot. The dying capital is not a shape any more, it is a light source, and everything around it is lit by it.

The skies went the same way

The default used to be stars on black. There are now around thirty backgrounds and center bodies, eclipses, quasars, magnetars, a black hole with its accretion disc, an ocean world with a ringed giant behind it, and every random battle rolls its own weather so you rarely fly the same sky twice.

What I would like from you

• Which of the ten reads as a picture, and which is just noise? I have my own ranking, but I have been staring at these for too long to trust it.
• Is the light too busy in the fleet shots? A few people on Reddit said the ships could stand to be a little lighter against the glow, and I think they might be right.
• Anything you would want to see in the sky or in a fight that is not there yet.

Comments under this post or a thread on the discussion board both work, I read all of it. The free demo lands at the end of August and the full game in November. Thanks for looking.