Fake "Vector" bloom

For the game I'm doing I wanted to try and fake a little of the "bloom" quality old vector arcade games like Asteroids, Major Havoc, etc... Like so:

<img src="http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee215/JDoejoe/SpaceDuel2_zps3a44bbac.jpg" border="0" />

So, I have a ship sprite:

<img src="http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee215/JDoejoe/Ship1_zpsd84ae6be.gif" border="0" />

And I'm wondering if I should try to "pre-bake" some bloom in with photoshop? Or perhaps add some effects to the sprite in Construct?

I've tried to add in a few different Construct effects already (motion blur, glow) and haven't really gotten anything that great... I don't really know enough about what effects are available (and most importantly, how they work in combination) to get what I'm looking for. But I keep thinking doing it in Construct would probably give it a little more life, for lack of a better term.

So, has anyone tried this kind of thing?

Thanks!

You can put 3 effects on a layer to get that effect: blur horizontal, blur vertical, glow (in that order). Prebaking the effect will be much, much more efficient for the gpu though.

I've always felt like games that use effects made available through its dev software tend to have a more "live" feel, but this may not be entirely impossible to do using Photoshop on the images. The good thing about using a baked-in approach with Photoshop or Gimp or whatever to achieve an effect, is that you won't be as heavily taxing the resources your game will need to run those same effects live.

You can put 3 effects on a layer to get that effect: blur horizontal, blur vertical, glow (in that order). Prebaking the effect will be much, much more efficient for the gpu though.

You beat me to it; I guess I was just typing my message as you were hitting post reply on yours <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Got it. Looks like I'm going to be spending more time in Photoshop!

Thanks again.