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Game Programming and Design Blog

2010 January

Free Game Assets 09; Generic Platform Game Tiles

12:03 pm on January 29, 2010 by Jackson Matthews

First of all, sorry this is a couple of days late, but hopefully you’ll find some use for it regardless. This week, up for download is a set of generic platform game tiles, although if you can find another use for them, feel free! Also included for kicks are sprites for a key item and a coin item. Below is a sample screen showing an example of the tiles in action:

Example screen showing how the tiles fit together.

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Free Game Assets 08; Playing Card Pack

2:11 pm on January 20, 2010 by John Wordsworth

Our next free game asset pack is a little bit more specialised than our previous assets packs, so may or may not be relevant to your project. We have designed and developed a set of poker card images for use in your game project(s). You can download these card images and use them in your project(s) as you wish.

The compulsory sample image for your perusal;

Playing Cards Sample Showing the 3 Pack Variants
Playing Cards Sample Showing the 3 Pack Variants (Click to Enlarge)

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Free Game Dev Utility; Fancy Bitmap Font Generator

2:27 pm on January 13, 2010 by John Wordsworth

We are happy to announce the initial testing release of our Fancy Bitmap Font Generator utility for Game Developers. While specifically designed for XNA developers to quickly add nice sprite fonts to their games, I’m sure you could use this in a large variety of environments without too much pain.

 

Fancy Bitmap Font Generator Screenshot

Fancy Bitmap Font Generator Screenshot (Click to Enlarge)

To read more about this free utility, please head over to the Iron Star Media Fancy Bitmap Font Generator page.

 

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Free Game Assets 07; Game Icon Pack

1:23 pm on by John Wordsworth

A day later than originally planned thanks to the genius idea of writing a sprite-font generator for scratch instead of just putting together in Photoshop, we present to you… The Iron Star Media Free Game Assets Pack 07 – Game Icons 01. This pack provides you with; Network game lobby icons (5 icons in 5 different colour sets), a pack of generic icons and media icons (in 3 colour sets), some alternative xbox controller button icons and some Sprite Fonts generated from our upcoming software the ‘Fancy Bitmap Font Generator’. 

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Apologies about the delayed assets

1:03 am on by John Wordsworth

I just wanted to post a quick apology that this Tuesday’s game assets didn’t go out as planned. Rest assured that they are coming – but for one week only we will be delivering on a Wednesday instead. Consider it like ‘late mail’ because of all of the snow! 

The reason it’s taken a bit longer than planned, was that part of our giveaway was to include some shiny bitmap fonts with glossy effects. Then I thought – instead of doing each letter in Photoshop, why not write a program to do it for me!? Here is an example image produced by our, soon-to-be-released (possible not with the assets tomorrow, but soon) software for turning your boring flat fonts into something a bit more shiny, just by tweaking a few parameters…

 

Sample From the Miramonte Font (Click for Full Size)

Sample From the Miramonte Font (Click for Full Size)

 

Sample of a fancy bitmap font from Pericles (click to enlarge)

Sample of a fancy bitmap font from Pericles (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

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Win your copy of Ikaroids (3 chances to win)

11:27 am on January 8, 2010 by John Wordsworth

Ikaroids is a fast-paced dual-stick shooter for the Xbox 360 that is available now on the Xbox Live Marketplace. With over 23 campaign stages and a challenging survival mode, Ikaroids combines the classic arcade-style shooter with modern-day physics and effects.

Ikaroids Screenshot

Screenshot from Ikaroids (Xbox 360)

This week, we’re giving away 3 copies of Ikaroids. For your chance to win a free copy of Ikaroids, simply tweet what your favourite ship is. Do you like the time-stopping Leander, the hard-hitting Kohlaraja, the defensive Pioneer or the technologically advanced Santus Rho?

Download the trial version to find out what your favourite ship is now!

In order to enter this competition, simply post a tweet in a similar format to the following from any twitter account and put the name of your favourite ship in the tweet! Deadline for entries is 1pm (GMT) on Friday 15th January 2010. Good luck!

I’ve been playing #Ikaroids and my favourite ship is [Insert Ship Name]. Ikaroids – http://bit.ly/6Vv0fC

For your entry to be valid, it must include the hashtag #Ikaroids (so we can find it), a valid name of a ship from Ikaroids and a link to the Ikaroids webpage. The winning entrant will be chosen at random on Friday 15th January and the winners will be announced on this website. Winning entrants will be contacted by Monday 18th January by direct message on Twitter.

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Free Game Assets 06; 55+ Basic Sound Effects

1:44 pm on January 5, 2010 by John Wordsworth

First off, a much needed happy new year to one and all. We hope that you had a fantastic break over the Christmas period and that you’re settling back into your real lives again as we speak. We’ve still got a bit of the Christmas cheer here at Iron Star Media and we’re happy to announce this week’s free game asset giveaway.

This week’s giveaway is a pack of basic sound effects built by our own fair hands. Sound effects in this pack range from blips and beeps for your user interfaces to a fairly random assortment of sounds such as squishes, clunks and scrapes. A full list of the files in this pack is available below.

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