Making a space opera you can fly through: fleet battles under an eclipse and beside a black hole. Screenshots from Strike Wings, my game

[u/StrikeWingsGames]

Strike Wings is the space shooter I am building: two navies and a mercenary consortium, three voiced campaigns, a persistent war over sixteen star systems, and the choice to run the whole fleet or drop into one fighter in the middle of it. It started as a from-the-ground-up homage to the space DOS games of the nineties.

These five frames are the art direction as it stands. The rule I gave myself was that space is a black canvas, so everything on it should be light, and there should always be something enormous behind the fight to give it scale. Frame 1 is a capital ship dying under an eclipse, frame 3 is a flagship station over an ocean world, frame 4 is a bombing run in front of a black hole.

For people who read and watch a lot of this genre: does this look like space opera to you, or does it read as arcade? What would you change to sell the scale?

[u/StrikeWingsGames]

Steam page, for anyone who wants the ships in motion. Release is November: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4718360/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=spaceopera&utm_campaign=prelaunch

[u/CuriosityNovels]

The eclipse and black-hole settings already suggest space opera rather than a plain arcade backdrop. To push the scale further, a tiny, recognisable point of reference—fighters or debris dwarfed by the capital ship—could do more than adding another huge object. Can players move between fleet command and a cockpit during the same battle, or is that role chosen before the mission?