things to spice up my cliched game

Yes I'm making space shooters, as everyone has. I'm doing it more for the experience of doing it, that and I'll actually be able to develop it fully. I'm doing it with GL so there's the potential for a lot of cool special effects (lighting and bump mapped objects are on the top of my list for cool special effects). Do you have any more ideas that would make my own version of space shooters at least a little bit interesting? Are there any other games that would be just as easy to develop (I honestly can't think of any, I haven't played arcade type games in such a long time, I'm only really doing this for the experience).

Thanks.

A particle engine!

That's actually a really good idea, I honestly hadn't thought of that yet, but I know how I could do it.

Is it going to be 3D? You're saying you're making a spaceshooter
like everyone else has made, But that means it's 2D, 3D space-
shooters are rare. Well, What's in your list of effects? There are
countless cool things you can do with OpenGL.

yes it's 3d, the models are going to be made with milkshape3d (just trying to get friends to make it). I'm still creatinga list of things that are 1)cool and 2)possible for me to do at my current experience level. I'm going to have basic lighting set up with opengl (i.e the gunsunder the space craft), I have textured models from the .ms3d format (I already have the loader for that working, I wrote it myself but it's almost identical to brett porters, i didn't copy it though, honest), now that eibro suggested it I'd like to have a simple particle engine, each particle will at least have a position and direction as well as energy (energy determines time to live, color, and speed). Bump mapped objects is something else I'm getting into, but that requires math so I'm a little hesitant (I haven't even taken trig yet, I'm in the crappy integrated math system :()

Well yeah that's what I had in mind. I'm doing this project mostly because I know I can actually do it and develop it all the way through, I don't want to be tackling fps just yet (although I'm still trying to learn all the math necessary for a simple renderer and mouse/keyboard movement in first person)

What is the perspective? Cockpit or 3rd person?

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What is the perspective? Cockpit or 3rd person?

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again I've been so wrapped up with other things (i.e getting a procedure, something similar to a windows procedure, setup to handle game events) that I haven't considered it deeply. I planned on having a fixed camera position behind the spaceship up 45 degrees at first. Do you think it would add a great deal if I had the camera rotation with the movement of the spaceship? Do you think it would add even more if you could toggle between 3rd person chase and cockpit view? Again that would involve some math, so I'm hesitant to do it.

Ok I would first of all like to say that I am bumping this thread. So far for the game I've got textured model loading from milkshape3d files working, I've got the basic structure of my game (it uses a gamecontroller object which provides the same type of functionality as a windows procedure, I even have 'send, get, and process message methods). I currently have the spaceship moving forwards and side to side with the keyboard, you can rotate the spaceship with the mouse about the y axis and the camera position follows directly behind the spaceship by rotating about it. Note so far these rotations only occur about the y axis (because I don't wnat to just cut and paste the rotation about an arbitrary axis without fully understanding how it's derived, and it's a complicated matrix). My friend and I have been talking and we're not too sure about the actual placement of objects in the world. Do you guys think we should have the spaceship stay in one place and simulate movement through the world? We've also decided against any type of complicated partitioning, rather we're going to use a star laden textured gluSphere to enclose what is visible, and only test if objects in the world are inside or outside the sphere. If they're in the sphere (even if they're outside the frustum) they get rendered (we're also going to have simple points randomly place just inside the sphere to give it depth). This 'simple' game is turning out to be much more complicated than I ever would've imagined, we're even discussing having a simple first person introduction scene where you can walk around the spaceship and look at the cockpit and the guns and stuff, but that is considered an extra. Ok guys tell me what you think, any and all suggestions/comments/criticisms/credit card numbers welcome.