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.

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

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’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.

Here is the full list of sound effect files included in this pack;

Interface Sound Effects – beep.wav, menu02.wav, pop.wav, bip.wav, menu03.wav, soft_tone.wav, click1.wav, menu04.wav, soft_tone_high.wav, click2.wav, menu05.wav, menu01.wav, menu06.wav

General Effects – click-snap.wav, clunk-click01.wav, clunk-click02.wav, clunk-click03.wav, crunch1.wav, crunch2.wav, crunch3.wav, drop.wav, impact1.wav, impact2.wav, impact3.wav, rip1.wav, rip2.wav, rip3.wav, rustle.wav, scrape1.wav, scrape2.wav, scrape3.wav, shuffle.wav, snap-open.wav, snap-shut.wav, snap.wav, snip.wav, squidge1.wav, squidge2.wav, squish-01.wav, whirr.wav, whirr_high.wav, white_noise.wav, wiggle.wav

Random Effects – alien-energy.wav, blacksmith-hammer01.wav, blacksmith-hammer02.wav, chopper.wav, drum.wav, heart-beat-scanner01.wav, jingling.wav, mining, pickaxe01.wav, mining-pickaxe02.wav, raygun.wav, tambourine.wav, vacuum.wav, vacuum_end.wav, vacuum_start.wav

A couple of samples can be listened to here; Squish Sound Effect - Sample Alien Energy Sound Effect - Sample Menu Sound Effect

As usual, these assets were all 100% generated by Iron Star Media, so you can be certain that the Creative Commons licence applies to all material. You can do pretty much what you like with these sounds effects, short of simply selling them as part of a CD/download or any other pack.

When you’re ready to take the plunge, download the Iron Star Media Free Game Assets Pack 06 – Over 55 Basic Sound Effects and simply drop these sound effects into your XNA or iPhone projects.

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.

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

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.“

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.

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.