So, what do we have this week?

We’ve been trying to put together some more interface graphics to help make your user interfaces more friendly and shiny. We’ve tried to keep them reasonably generic, so that you can brand them up with your game’s logo and your own font, but the goal is to give you the chance to get to your first prototype as quickly as possible. The obligatory screenshots follow;

Free High Definition Grunge Theme for your XNA Game (Click to Enlarge)

High Definition Victorian Theme for your XNA Game (Click to Enlarge)

These themes come with a background image (the Victorian Theme has 3 colour variations for the background image), a full screen overlay panel and a half screen overlay panel (for two player games, etc). The panels can easily be scaled down to the desired size if they are too big for what you need them for. Imagery is provided at full 1920×1080p and the full screen overlay should allow for overscan (although, you might want to shrink it an extra 10-15% for the Xbox 360).

Download the themes from our online asset library; Iron Star Media’s Grunge Theme, Iron Star Media’s Victorian Theme

I’d like to finish with a quick shameless plug… If you’ve not already heard the news, our Xbox 360 Shooter Ikaroids has recently been reduced to only 80 Microsoft Points, give it a look!

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, either individually, or as part of a collection.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Below you will find a small collection of MP3s that you are free to use in your own game title. All that is required in return is that you credit us somewhere in your release notes. Of course, if you make it rich from a game that uses a selection of our assets, we won’t mind if you want to donate us a few pennies for our work.

The first assets we would like to release are tracks that never quite made it into our first XNA title – mostly because the theme just wasn’t right for our game. We’re still getting to grips with our music generating software, so we apologise if these tracks aren’t brilliant, but please bear in mind it’s the start of something that will just get better and better! We also hope that this starts a trend that of giving away assets that we can try to keep up on a weekly basis.

The tracks that you can download and use in your XNA / iPhone game projects this week are;

Menu 001 – Some relatively ’spacey’ menu music for a space based game.

Random 001 – Some reasonably generic drum-beat game music.

Random 002 – A little bit ‘folky’, this might make good tavern or docks music for an RPG!

Orchestral 001 – This is something a little more epic. I’m not sure where you would use this, but it might work for some FMV or equivalent!?

I hope that someone out there finds this useful. We’ll try to bring you another release of free assets (of some random variety) sometime next week!

As always, please leave any comments or thoughts in the boxes below.

Edit. Please let us know if you have any requests for types of music. We won’t make it to exact specifications, but if you would like something in a specific genre (e.g. more menu music, or friendly platformer music) that would give me a goal for future tracks. These were just me getting used to the software and I’d like to develop by making more in-depth (and better) tracks!