Artstyle
I love black & white. Not the game, the lack of colors for art in games. That might have to do with the fact that everytime I use colors it gets coder-ugly but nonetheless, many black & white games (LIMBO, e.g.) do have a very adultish and beautiful look. So when I first started out with all this, of course I made iconic ships (that also had to do with their very restrited size, some are as small as 32x32 pixels) and I made them black and white.
Now that I started the campaign and made up its very crude and cliché story (aliens destroyed earth, you're in your rocket looking for a new home...), I started to ask some friends what else they'd suggest art-wise. One of them told me that the iconic style was good, esp. for my (as mentioned) small entities, but that a little bit of a retroish look wouldn't hurt.
Now as far as pixel-graphics are concerned retro has really been beaten to death, but he was referring to shapes of stuff and dropped Bioshock as a reference. Once I dug a little into retro spaceships it occured to me that there is a whole retro sci fi community with an (in my opinion) absolutely amazing and unique art style that reminds me of old arcade machines. I couldnt think of anything better to raise exctly the right expectations in the potential audience for space odyssey that I am hoping to satisfy gameplay-wise...
But enough talk, just click this google images search example and see for yourself...