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2009 December

Ikaroids Patch 1.07 Released

8:01 pm on December 31, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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 that you can set the sound effect volume and the music volume independently. Hopefully now the explosion sound effects will balance nicely with the background music on your uber hi-fis! Last, but not least, you can now brag about your hi-scores to a friend directly from the console.

If you already have your copy of Ikaroids, your Xbox should automatically download the latest version. If you’ve not yet bought Ikaroids – then what are you waiting for? Head over to the Xbox Live Marketplace to download it now.

Screenshot from Ikaroids - Arcade Shooter for the Xbox 360

Screenshot from Ikaroids - Arcade Shooter for the Xbox 360

If you’re still in doubt, here are what some of the Peer Reviewers said;

“Very polished and very cool. Nice lighting on the Avatars as well.”

“Very polished game you have. I enjoyed playing it, it looked and played great.”

“It didn’t take long to realise that this is a really well polished game, really enjoyed it.“

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Free Game Assets 05; Planet Sprites and Textures

3:01 pm on December 29, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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!

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Merry Christmas!

11:06 pm on December 24, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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 the near future.

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Free Game Assets 04; User Interface Sprites

1:46 pm on December 22, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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.

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Free Game Assets 03; Low-Poly Sports Models

5:24 pm on December 15, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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.

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

10:40 pm on December 11, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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 here) on a laptop or computer with a finger print scanner, you may have noticed that, 98% of the time you’re presented with the following error “Autodesk Softimage has stopped working”. You’ve probably already tried these; http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Startup_Problems – I even uninstalled QuickTime and iTunes.

Turns out that there is some crazy conflict between the Digital Persona Fingerprint scanner drivers that stops XSI Mod Tool from loading. I don’t know if this is specific to Vista 64 or it’s an across the board problem. Anyhow – the fix… Bring up your Windows Task Manager and kill “DpAgent.exe” and “DpAgent.exe *32″. That’s it. You won’t have a working fingerprint scanner until you restart, but you can model away to your hearts content. Enjoy.

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Free Game Assets 02; Sprites for Particle Effects

12:14 pm on December 8, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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.

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Creating an Animated Sprite

11:25 am on December 7, 2009 by Jackson Matthews

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.

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Ikaroids; Now Available on the Xbox Live Marketplace!

10:28 am on December 6, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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 features 23 varied missions with a massive variety of bad-guys, bosses and story-twists. When you’ve mastered all three difficulty levels of the main campaign there are 9 addictive survival stages for you to challenge. If that were not enough, you can play through the game alone or in co-op mode and you can submit your high scores to an online scoreboard using your PC.

You can download Ikaroids from your Xbox by browsing to Game Marketplace -> Indie Games. There you can list games by title and find Ikaroids for your gaming fun. Alternatively, you can buy Ikaroids from your PC, so that it’ll simply download and install the next time you turn on your Xbox. Download Ikarois now from the Xbox Live Marketplace.

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Free Music for Independent Game Developers 01

5:15 pm on December 1, 2009 by John Wordsworth

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.

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