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.
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;
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 (Click to Enlarge)
To read more about this free utility, please head over to the Iron Star Media Fancy Bitmap Font Generator page.
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’.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this post I’m going to talk about five of the things I have a powerful dislike for in commercial games. Of course, needless to say, this is just my opinion, but these are the things that I’d like to see a lot less of in games in general.
After the second round of playtesting for Ikaroids, we found that a number of comments were coming back to us stating that the game was rather difficult. Instead of simply dumbing down the game, we added the classic Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings to the game. Here’s some discussion about how we did that, and how to pre-empt the playtesters comments!
There is nothing more detrimental to quick progress than poor planning. We’ve all had times when partaking in a project where we get confused and lost, or we’re coding away without any real purpose. I find this often simply comes down to not really knowing what the final goal of a class, project or function really is. If we can sit back, look at an overview and understand just what it is that we’re aiming for – a lot of coding becomes plugging in the gaps. I’m going to show you the general programming overview of Ikaroids to help you plan your project. You may develop your game in a completely different way – and this way is neither perfect or the definitive way to do it, this is just an example of how we did it to give you some ideas.
It’s worth remembering that while graphics can look pretty, it’s important not to let them dominate at the expense of other crucial elements. In this post I’m going to talk about the process of level design in the context of Ikaroids, including topics such as pacing, spacing of elements, and general look, feel and theme.
