Monthly Archives October 2009

Ikaroids: Playtesting… Nearly there

Well, Ikaroids is very, very close to a final release, we’re just in that last no-man’s land known as playtesting. Which basically amounts to us, and anyone else willing to do so, playing the hell out of this game. It also means that the above screens are a little out of date, as so much ...

Tutorial: Panelling Effects on a Sprite

In this post I’m going to show you the stages I use to apply a ‘panelling’ effect on my machine sprites, to give the impression that a sprite has been constructed. These little details, such as raised and indented areas, can really bring an otherwise simple surface to life very fast.

Tools needed:

Photoshop

Tutorial: Creating a Planet Sprite

Today I’m going to take you through the basic process of making a planet sprite. This will come in useful for background images, scenery, or icons.

Tools used:

Adobe Photoshop (or similar graphics program)

Sentinel Development Diary 1 / Planning, Concepts and Initial Work

This is the first proper entry in the Development Diary for our latest XNA Independent Game entitled Sentinel. Iron Star Media consists of two developers; John Wordsworth (@johnwordsworth) – a programmer and lightweight artist, and Jackson Matthews (@oliacym) – a heavyweight artist and designer. This series of blog posts will show you how we made our second game and will hopefully shed some insight into the overall procedures behind game development as well as giving some tips based on the lessons we learnt. 

Today we document the first 5 hours of development with some planning, concepts and basic ground work.

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XNA: The title-safe area and SDTVs

In this article we discuss the trials of working to the title-safe area in your own Independent XNA titles. We look at the problems that this can raise and possible solutions that you should consider right from the start of the project.

On face value, working to ensure that the contents of your console / XNA title fit may sound like a trivial task. However, we have learnt our lesson well, and after our first project – we have come to realise that it’s something that you have to consider right from the beginning. Not everyone has a 42 inch 1080p screen like you might, and making sure your game works across all types of displays can cause a real headache if left to the last minute. 

Tutorial: Creating a Boss Sprite

In this post I hope to take you through the basic stages of putting together the pieces for a boss sprite. Obviously everyone is going to have their own preferred technique, but here’s what I found worked best for me once I’d made a few already and had the process refined to a point I was happy with.

Development starts on second Xna title

Iron Star Media have started work on their second XNA title while Ikaroids goes through it’s second bout of playtesting. We’ll be posting a development diary as we work through every decision and step in our game ‘Sentinel’. This will hopefully help budding developers see the steps that we go through and learn from our ...

Game Programming & Design Blog

We are launching this blog as a place to post information that we learn during our trials and tribulations as learning independent game developers. Hopefully, over time, the information on these pages will flourish into a useful resource, or at least prove as an interesting reference and a good read.