Monthly Archives December 2009

Ikaroids Patch 1.07 Released

We are happy to announce that the first official patch for Ikaroids is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Patch 1.07 (excuse the strange numbering system) addresses a few issues that were affecting some players with regards to the logic of the survival stages. We have also added persistent options to the game so ...

Free Game Assets 05; Planet Sprites and Textures

I know we said that we’d probably be too busy to release another free game asset pack pre-new-year, but we have managed to find the time to bring more content to the developer community.

This week, we’ll mostly be serving planets – both in the form of sprites for your 2D games and as textures for your 3D games. Obviously, we’ve not packaged models with the textures, as you’re probably more than competent at creating a sphere for the texture to stretch over!

Merry Christmas!

We want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas from the Iron Star Media offices. We hope that you have some great festivities planned and that you have a well deserved break from work and real life! Keep your eyes peeled for more game developer freebies and some free copies of Ikaroids that we’ll be giving away in ...

Free Game Assets 04; User Interface Sprites

With Christmas just around the corner, this is likely to be our last game development assets give away of the year. Rest assured however, that we’re working on something rather epic for early in the new year.

So, what do we have for you? A collection of sprites for you to use in creating a user interface for your XNA game. We’ve specifically sized the elements to fit a 1080×720 resolution, but I’m sure with some minor shinanigans you could use them on other resolutions too.

Free Game Assets 03; Low-Poly Sports Models

Another Tuesday and another pack of free game assets. This week we’ve been learning how to use XSI Mod Tool Pro (the free assets should get much better when we’ve had some good experience using these tools!). In order to celebrate, we’ve been working on some free 3D models for indie developers.

XSI Mod Tool – Fix crash on startup on laptops with digital persona

Perhaps the shortest blog post in the world, and only applicable to a very small cross-section of the geek population. However, if this little nugget of knowledge saves one other person the hours it took me to find this out, my work is done. If you’re trying to run SoftImage XSI Mod Tool (version 7.5 ...

Free Game Assets 02; Sprites for Particle Effects

Another Tuesday and another selection of free assets for our readers to enjoy. While there are countless tutorials on putting together an efficient particle system in a number of programming languages, the core of the particle effects you’ll enjoy in your game requires sprites. We’re offering up a selection of sprites that you can use in your very own particle systems in your XNA (or any other) independent game.

Creating an Animated Sprite

In this post I’m going to show you the basics of animating a simple sprite, in this example a medieval knight. All of this was done in Photoshop CS4, so I’ll be referring to that in the steps outlined.

Ikaroids; Now Available on the Xbox Live Marketplace!

Our first Xbox Live Indie Games title ‘Ikaroids’ is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace! Ikaroids is an action packed twin-stick arcade style shooter wtih a unique physics and game engine that encourages you to use parts of the scenary in a defensive manner while avoiding devastating collisions with the asteroids. The main campaign ...

Free Music for Independent Game Developers 01

Here at Iron Star Media Ltd. we still very much learning the ropes when it comes to generating assets for our games. However, we’re in the fortunate position in that we’ve had a reasonable amount of experience playing around with Photoshop and Garageband in our spare time.

This post marks the first release of free assets that we would like to release to the community to help other independent developers who need assets for their games.