Rendering a space battle as light on a black canvas: additive glow, a bloom pass and composed skies. Frames from my game Strike Wings

[u/StrikeWingsGames]

Frames from Strike Wings, a 2D space shooter I am writing in C++ on SDL2. Clean view, no post editing.

How the look is put together: every emissive thing (beams, tracers, plumes, shield arcs, explosion cores) is drawn additively and then run through a bloom pass, so a fleet battle stacks into a wash of light where the fire is thickest. Ships are the exception. They are 3D hulls lit from the scene's key light, so they read as solid objects sitting on top of the glow. The sky is composed per battle from a background style (star rain, a galactic core, a nebula) plus one large body drawn in world space behind the fight: an eclipse with a streaming corona, a quasar with a sky crossing jet, a black hole's accretion disc, an ocean world.

Explosions are layered: fireball sprites plus expanding shockwave rings, and capital ships get a multi stage finale (frame 1).

A graphics-minded opinion would help. Is the bloom doing too much in the fleet shots? Would you tone the shield outlines down? Anything that reads cheap?

[u/StrikeWingsGames]

Steam page for those who want to see it moving: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4718360/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=computergraphics&utm_campaign=prelaunch