Ikaroids - Action Packed Arcade Shooter for only 80MSP

Plans have begun for a sequel to Ikaroids that will bring the space shooter genre into the 21 century. Because of this, we’d love to hear what you think about the first one. Let us know of things that you like and don’t like about the game by leaving us comments around this blog or by getting in touch with us directly.

Read more about Ikaroids or head over to the XBox Live Marketplace now and buy Ikaroids for only 80MSP!

Included, among others are:

• Concrete
• Brick wall
• Cork board
• Manhole cover

Enjoy!

Example screen showing how the tiles fit together.

Included in the pack are:

• Bricks (tiles in all directions)
• Grass (tiles horizontally)
• Grass with rocks (horizontal)
• Soil (multidirectional)
• Soil with rocks (multidirectional)
• Snow top (horizontal)
• Snow (multidirectional)
• Brown stone top (horizontal)
• Brown stone (multidirectional)
• Grey stone top (horizontal)
• Grey stone (multidirectional)
• Key sprite
• Coin sprite

Which just about covers it! All sprites are in PNG-24 format and are 256 x 256 each. For the full pack, click here: ism-assets-09-platform-game-tiles.zip

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website (and a free copy of the game would be cool!). Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

The compulsory sample image for your perusal;

Included in the pack is a classic set of cards, a modern set of cards and a set of cards with space in the middle for custom artwork. Each set is available in 3 formats – individual card files (high resolution), sprite sheets (high resolution – you will need to resize them down to the correct size for your project) and as sprite fonts (so you can SpriteBatch.DrawString(…) them in your project).

When you are ready to take the plunge, download the pack here; ism-assets-08-playing-cards.zip

We have based the images of the royal cards on what we believe to be Public Domain imagery that is commonplace on most card decks available in the UK. Many websites imply that these are in the Public Domain, but we’ve not confirmed this to be true. If are to use these images in your commercial project, I would suggest that you confirm that the likenesses we used are Public Domain and can be used in your project.

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website (and a free copy of the game would be cool!). Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

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.

Here is a sample of what you will find in the pack (not all icons are shown);

Sample Icons / Spritefonts from our Free Icon Pack (Click to Enlarge)

So, if it’s icons that you’re looking for, why not download the Iron Star Media Free Game Assets Pack 07 – Icon Pack 01? As per usual, you can pretty much do what you like with this stuff apart from sell it. Although, if you use them in your project, a charity purchase of Ikaroids wouldn’t go amiss!

Don’t forget, that you can win a copy of Ikaroids by entering our competition which ends on Friday 15th January 2010. To find out how you could win a copy of Ikaroids, read about our Ikaroids Competition here.

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website (and a free copy of the game would be cool!). Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

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.

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!

Here are the obligatory screen shots to sell the pack. You’ll probably have more luck making the textures look good than I managed this morning. I applied a simple phong shader in XSI Mod Tool with some dodgy speculative settings, but I’m sure you could get a lot more out of the textures with a better shader and some basic Hue/Saturation changes.

Sample screenshot using the Free Planet Textures

Screenshot of the free Planet Texture Giveaway

And here is a mash-up generated using the sprite versions of these planets. Sprite version of the planets have been provided as 8-bit PNGs at 1024×1024 so that you can drop them straight into your project and get using them straight away.

Screenshot mash-up using the free planet sprites.

As usual, if you like what you see, then you’re free to use this pack either for use in a prototype version of your game or the real deal.  Download the pack here; Iron Star Media Free Game Assets 05 – Planet Sprites and Textures. In order to save some space, we’ve not provided the source PSD files – we’ve packaged the textures as JPG files with maximum quality (they were 60% of the size of PNG24s) and the sprites are 8-bit PNG files. If you have a burning desire to see our Photoshop Source Files, just give me a buzz and we’ll throw what we can your way.

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website (and a free copy of the game would be cool!). Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

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.

Pictures speak a thousand words (search for ‘top 20 ugly celebrities’… go on, I dare you). So here are some shots of the buttons and dialog boxes we’ve included in this weeks giveaway.

Sample Industrial Game Interface

Sample Grunge Game Interface

If you like the look of these interfaces and fancy using some parts of these packs in your game, then enjoy! Download the pack here; Iron Star Media Free Game Assets 04 – Game User Interface Sprites. We’re not able to package the font with the files I’m afraid, so you’ll have to source your own font for your interfaces. You can either generate buttons for each sprite using a custom font, or you might be able to get away with layering the text over the top in your engine. Experiment, explore and have fun!

We understand that we don’t want stacks of games all looking the same, so we’ve packaged up the source files for the Grunge and the Industrial themes and you can download the .PSDs to make your own derivative works below. Download the Free Game User Interface Sprites Source Files.

Buttons from the Industrial Game Interface

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website. Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

I’m not going to lie, these models are not Picasso quality. We’ve intentionally kept the polygon count down quite low (you could probably get away with these in an iPhone game as well as an Xbox game). These models are of some sports equipment and are intended to be used from a reasonably far away camera / for a split-screen game etc. They don’t hold up too well when you zoom in full screen on them, nor are they supposed too – we wanted something you could either use during your prototyping or in the background of your game.

Please note that, apart from the baseball bat; these models are not textured.

You should be able to find some good textures on some stock photo sites for free (or near to it), but we didn’t feel that we could package those sorts of images with these models. The baseball bat texture is made by our own hands, so you can do what you will with that.

XNA Baseball Bat Model

XNA Ping Pong Paddle

The pack contains – A textured baseball bat, an american football, a ping pong paddle, a javelin and a hockey stick. Files are in XSI format for use in SoftImage Mod Tool. If you need them in an alternative format, just let us know. Download the pack from here; Iron Star Media Free Game Assets 03 – Low Poly Sports Models.

As always, if you have any specific requests for what type of assets we should be giving away, just leave a comment below and we’ll do our best.

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website. Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.

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.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s are the particle sprites in this pack on a black background;

 Free particle effect sprites for game developers

The particles all come as 24-bit png’s and they’re intended to be used with their colour settings and alpha settings being tweaked as the particle moves about. If you’d like further information about how they were made – please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

If you’d like to use these in your project – Download the Iron Star Media Particle Effect Sprites Pack 01.

As always, if you have any specific requests for what type of assets we should be giving away, just leave a comment below and we’ll do our best.

The free game assets on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This basically means that you can download them, use them in your game(s) and modify them as you like. If you use them in your games, we’d appreciate a small mention somewhere in the credits / on the website. Basically, the only thing we don’t want you to do with our assets is sell them as assets to other developers.