I spent a good number of hours trying to find a nice graphical style for a new BlastTrax, last night.

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I'm thinking Wormhole, and am desperately trying to figure out nice graphical effects for such a thing, but without overwhelming the browser.. Which is the biggest issue!
Since all graphics are inside fairly large spritesheets, it makes oversizing them really hard to do.
I played around with a few ideas yesterday, but as soon as I hit x4 oversizing, the whole engine slows to a crawl.

Dangit..



The above image is very obviously an early test!!
Please ignore..
A) I haven't drawn a main sprite yet.
B) The background's a simple wave line
C) The fluffballs aren't exactly "Nebulae" like.

The nebulae splots are supposed to be much bigger, and also alpha'd so they don't look as obviously splot-like in their appearance.
Unfortunately, scale them up and the browser slows down.
Additionally, after rotating, if I then reduce their opacity, this also impacts how well the browser can draw things.
It's really not all that great, and causes extreme slowdown even on a MacBook M1..
The solution in this case, I think, would be to head back to the Rainbow Road style, and get that to draw as quickly as I can.

Another option would be to add a secondary backbuffer, and then parallax those to give the effect of moving rapidly through space.
With the addition of a starfield, it might look good enough, but I'm not entirely hopeful that it won't just end up looking far too repetitive.

Of course, there's also the possibility that I could remove the road entirely, and just have the ship flying on a nondescript path, but that would reduce the "loveliness" that the rainbow road originally brought, plus.. .. Let's be honest, it'd be weird to have the ship flying on a predetermined path without any rhyme or reason!

I'll likely keep trying today, but if nothing's happening, I'll set this game aside for another try later.
No point wasting more of the week on it!