How to give parallax backgrounds more depth

Posted by user28015 on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by user28015
Published on 2012-11-16T16:47:40Z Indexed on 2012/11/16 17:17 UTC
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game-maker

I have 3 tiled images of some sort of galaxy/space in the background of a 2D Game: The first one has an alpha of 100%, the second an alpha of 80% and the last one has an alpha of 60%. I scroll the the one in the background slower than the other ones of course. classic parallax. In the foreground I have some particles flying towards the player to simulate some dust / stars flying by. (I know that stars don't fly by, but I think we all have seen this in a lot of games). But I can't quite achieve the depth effect I am looking for. I want it to look "deeper".

I did read something about using blending modes for the backgrounds, but that would require to render them as objects right?

So the question is: What is a good technique to do a scrolling parallax background in GameMaker?

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