Hello!
It feels like the camera is making basically the same movement again and again, just centered on a different ship each time. Varying between a selection of such pre-defined movements would help keep it interesting. Sometimes a zoom, sometimes a pan, sometimes attach the camera to the hull of a ship so you can watch it zoom about (or if the ship models have the level of detail; show a battleship's laser guns swing around and blow something up.) Don't be afraid to add camera shake when there's an explosion near the camera's position too.
If you want to have a more recent sci-fi feel to the cinematic camera, consider having it behave much more like it's attached to a physical object that's moving through space rather than being a purely abstract position vector. Consider how the camera moves in the Firefly series or Serenity film when it shows ships flying around - it gets knocked, rocked around and the camera seems to struggle to track fast moving ships, which creates a powerful physical sense of these ships actually existing. Compare this with Star Trek:TNG era sci-fi, which has perfectly smooth camera pans and tracking much like your current camera system. Smooth and well controlled cameras are a great asset during standard gameplay, but for this kind of optional cinematic camera you can afford to concentrate more on neat effects at the expense of practicality.
Is the direction that the camera ends up pointing random? Would be nice if it more clearly showed what the ship is engaging. I really know nothing about film directing, but I think there are various techniques for showing conflict between characters by their positions on screen. At least aim to have the camera's set up take into account the position of a ship and their target.
An example of a cinematic camera that occurred to me was the one used in GTA4. It was completely impractical for actually playing the game (too often failing to show where the player was headed) but it had a good variety of camera positions and movements which kept it interesting to watch. If you're able to check that out it may give some useful ideas.
The effects are pretty nice, and I'm glad to see at least fairly colourful planets and space backgrounds.
I notice on the blog post you talk about how particular ships take much more damage to destroy. I wasn't able to see this from the video. I think this is due to the camera cutting to a new sweeping movement all the time, which made it hard for me to keep track of where a particular ship was; let alone its relative health. This isn't necessarily a problem, as the cinematic camera would be for getting neat views of the battle rather than being the primary means of getting information about what's going on.
The fight itself feels very static. Obviously the game is still in development, but as a potential player I would be worried that it looks like combat is just lining up ships and watching lasers. Show light fighters darting around the hulking battleships and missile frigates lurking at the back hurling attacks from range. It is quite possible that these things are happening in the video, but I wasn't able to see it.
Showing some tactics in action throughout the video would be nice too, telling a simple story through the video. It's a strategy game, so be sure to show potential players some strategy in action!
Now you should really
introduce yourself! Hang around, give feedback to other people, discuss art stuff, technical stuff, argue with Paul Eres. It'll be grand.
Developer
