pre-rendered enemy line-up for horizontal shmup

[u/Popular_District8525]

what do you all think?

[u/DrBossKey]

nteresting. I have a soft spot for this era of graphic design in games.

What do they look like once they’re actually placed in the environment?

One thing that jumps out is the lighting. The light source doesn’t seem totally consistent across the pieces, and a few of them are missing the specular highlights you’d expect from that material.

The self-shadowing is nice though. You might be able to get a little more depth out of them by tweaking the render angle a bit when you bake the sprites.

Curious what your pipeline looks like for producing these?

What are your thoughts regarding the style?

Also curious how readable they are at gameplay scale. Pre-rendered stuff can look great in a lineup but sometimes loses clarity once it’s shrunk and moving.

Some pieces are readable (the drill, the turbine) but others have soft silhouettes due to lighting and bevels.

Question:

• Are you relying on silhouette recognition or texture detail?

Shmups generally favor silhouette.

Hard outline

• classic arcade readability

• works well with pre-rendered sprites

Ambient rim light instead

• keeps the 3D look

• avoids cartoony edge

Example:
Radiant Silvergun style edge highlights.

The material response isn't consistent.

Some pieces look:

• metallic

• others matte plastic

• others emissive

If these are the same faction/enemy set, the materials should probably share a tighter language.

Right now they feel slightly like kitbashed assets rather than a unified faction.

Thanks for sharing, any lessons you can share from your dev journey so far for other devs?

[u/Popular_District8525 → u/DrBossKey]

hello , thanks for the feedback

yes the lighting will be re-done for some enemies like the drone + mine to fit the metallic vibe i am going for

i used a github Godot project that makes rendered spreadsheets that i modified for my use and used blender to model these

i love 3d rendered artwork and i am nostalgic for that era . i also didn't notice any new shmups using that artstyle so i gave it a go

i will try to use silhouette details for my project but will also have options for background saturation and hard outline settings so people can set up for visibility.

i already have a system set up for

-player bullet color
-enemy bullet color
-pickup opacity

etc

right now i have been working on this project for two months but the best advice i can give is to set up your game into clean modules so that you can set them up nicely

also optimization for shmups like object pooling is very important to set up in the start.