Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Download a complete set of sweet 8-bit Sinistar clone graphics

Download the complete graphics to Iron Plague, a Sinistar clone

As I dug through my archives of old images, I came across another complete set of graphics from 1995 for a wild Sinistar clone that was never released. I own all the copyrights and figure, what the heck. Some crazy fool who is still obsessed with the glory of pixel art might find a use for them.

Complete descriptions of all the graphics after the link. Enjoy!

This is the complete list of all the graphics. Since it was a space game, the number of tile sets is rather limited. We originally built the game map as a big bitmap that stuff was randomly blitted to. It had super smooth scrolling and pretty decent physics.

  • ActGrid: Spawn point for player's ship
  • Barrel: Repulses the players ship if it gets near
  • Base: Spawn enemy drones
  • Beacon (Destroyed, Searching, Red Alert) Sensor that looks for any enemy
  • Beacon2: Alternative sensor type
  • Blood: Splots of animated blood if you kill a space man.
  • Bomb1: Classic pulsating bomb. Exploded with great force, inevitably.
  • Bship: Battleship with cool rotating turrets. This thing was 3 times as large as your ship!
  • Bubble: What the hell?
  • Bullets: 6 types of bullets, each with 3 levels of power.
  • More bullets: Powerups and different color bullets for rock, paper, scissor attacking action.
  • Canister: The crate lives! Holds powerup, naturally
  • Cargo1: Ook? Alien nasty.
  • Cargo1b: Alien nasty damaged
  • Cargo2: Another cargo ship
  • Check: Checkpoint. When the player reaches this checkpoint, they regen from this location.
  • Crystal1: The cash of the game. The evil drones use this to make the Killer.
  • Crystal2: You have to realize that we didn't have the ability to rotate things easily. This was a radical attempt to create 16 rotational positions. 8-bit technology at it's peak.
  • Debris: The stuff that spews out when an asteroid is mined by drones
  • Debris2,3: More of the same.
  • Doomsday: Think of this as very nasty big bomb. If you hit it, the entire screen went 'foomp' and no more little player.
  • Drone: These little fellows run about gathering crystals in order to build the Killer. They'll orbit an asteroid, fire at it until a crystal appears and take it out.
  • Drone2: A more efficient type of drone
  • Exhaust1, 2, and 3: This flame comes out the back of a spaceship.
  • Explode1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: Ah, the glory of highly animated explosions with 1-bit alpha.
  • Face1: This fellow was the store keeper when you bought upgrades.
  • Factory: An enemy installation that made drones
  • Factory2: An enemy installation that made super drones
  • Factory 3: This is where the Killer was built.
  • Factory 4b: This is where the mini-Killer was built.
  • Flame: Fireballs stolen from Mario, no doubt
  • Flamer: Everything you need to make a flame thrower of death and burnination
  • Font: I'm in awe. Font with *high light selection*
  • Formref1: Reference on how formations worked. Galaga, move on over.
  • Gamemenu: The basic menu for the game. Check out those gears.
  • GravBcon: A gravitational beacon that sucked the player towards the deadly rocks.
  • GravGrid: Bubbles in space that acted as a simple form of terrain. Very fun.
  • Guard: These trigger happy campers guarded the drones. No one ever said plot was important to video games, dammit.
  • Gun: It looks more like a blimp, but this fired out little round bullets in streams.
  • Hiscore: Enter your name, record your score. If we had come out a few years later, we would have licenced some sweet Tony Hawk punk/death/metal sellout music for this screen.
  • Hunter1, 2: Attackers that come straight at you.
  • Items: All the great powerups you could get. I have no clue what they do, but I like shiny things. (Let's see: Generators to improve energy recharge, shields, health, rubber duckies, various weaspons, and the Amiga Checkmark)
  • Junkdrtst: Energy gates
  • Joystick: Back in the day you needed to calibrate your joystick. These are the interface graphics.
  • Junk: Destructable junk that acted as mazes for the level. You could blow holes in it...cause that's fun.
  • Keyboard: Keyboard configuration
  • Killer: Ode to Sinistar, my ass. Talk about exact copy. This happy looking fellow was a pain in the arse once he came to life.
  • Killer2: The mini-killer. Not quite a munchkin, but still damn sexy. His eyes would slowly come alight as he was built. He could also split apart when he was built.
  • Knife: Um...seems rather morbid.
  • Launcher: Another enemy ship. This one flew around spawning little ships
  • Mage: A logo for our team
  • Main: The intial interface. We went with a much more minimalist look in the end.
  • Main2: The final minimalist UI
  • MainMenu: Yet another menu template
  • Mine: These fellows floating around caused mucho pain
  • Missle: Hmm. Sloppy, sloppy. The high light is off in the lower left corner.
  • Mouse: UI for selecting mouse control.
  • Names: All the cool folks in our development team. I still talk to Leinad (music), and wReam (Hmm...what did he do?) and Zoombapup (programmer...he ended up working on Worms for ages)
  • Nebula: Gotta have background graphics
  • Options: The options screen. In the end, it is all about 'Exit to DOS'
  • Pointer: The mouse pointer. It changed when you clicked.
  • PShip2: The player ship. I spent time on the 16 rotational animations so that it would be smooooothy. Like the fine inner thigh of a lovely amazonian princess right after a day of mudbaths and waxing. I was such a proud young artist.
  • Rock: An asteroid that contains crystals and be blown to smithereens.
  • Ship: One of my first attempts at 3D graphics. This took ages to render on a pirated copy of 3ds running in the old computer lab. I think we ran it on the fastest machine on campus, a 486.
  • Ship2: Sweet!
  • Ship3, 4, 5, and 6: Enemy! (Really, all the explanation that was needed)
  • ShipGun: Imagine this...a ship with a rotating turret. Man, that would be so cool.
  • Smasher: Ever have those days when the programmer laughs and laughs and laughs at you? This enemy had an animated energy ball on a chain. Add some primitive physics and you put that little cutie from Kill Bill to shame.
  • Spaceman: When certain ships where destroyed, little guys fell out. They really only existed to be shot. I think I stole the idea from the joy of running over little people in the Amiga game "Firepower."
  • Spacestor: If you made it here, you could buy cool stuff
  • Spike: Dangerous walls
  • Store3: The interface for the store.
  • Sun: The central sun that all this junk floated around. If you fell in, you got hurt. Flares flew out of it periodically.
  • Teleport: A jump gate between sections of the map
  • Test1: A mockup showing the store in action
  • Test2: A mockup showing the game in action
  • Warp: No clue
  • Wave: A giant gun that fired huge waves of fire at the player.
  • Worm: A squirmy worm creature.

And I'm spent.

28 comments:

  1. I still think this game would be very fun to make. There were lots of interesting things in it.

    Bri's tractor beam was the coolest thing... and damaged stars could come alive, and could be used to help destroy the big nasty flaming bird that was supposed to come after you... I thought we had a pretty cool story too.

    Sigh... Oh Danc... how do we go on living, knowing all these missed opportunities!? ;-)

    --Ray

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  2. I've already seen someone build a basic ship flying around using these graphics. The power of open source...that is where it is at these days.

    take care
    Danc.

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  3. Think I've used those for some Director-experiments as well :)

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  4. Sigh. Danc. We had a demo with a basic ship flying around, and Bri's had a TRACTOR BEAM. The problem was FINISHING the game into a product. Open Source does not solve that problem. I'm glad you're seeing progress with it, and I hope that it does someday get to see the light of day, but I don't think the problem we faced then is any more likely to be solved, and you're still not getting the game WE wanted out of it.

    The hardest part of a game is finishing it into something people buy. All that crap I thought was useless, including who writes the manual, and who markets the game, and so forth.

    Well... that and a good story... ;) (Hahahah)

    Okay I'm giving you a hard time, cuz I like to do that... it's kind of my job... most of the people around you worship you, I know this... I just stare in stupified awe, but no worship... dang it!

    Heheh... Have a happy one, dude...

    --Ray

    PS> Btw, The only coder I knew that finished games consistently and had absolutely no help graphically was a guy in Canada named Patrick Maidorn... (did you ever meet him? Epic looked at him as a developer briefly, but his game mechanic was too simple, and he favored doing puzzle games, which was not the direction Epic was going...) I think he still does a one-man outfit called Midnight Synergy, did some game called Wonderland a while back... I ought to see if he's still around, send him a link to your site.

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  5. Woah! So tyrianish ;) Very cool!!!!!!!!

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  6. Mm this is a gold mine. Something that Allegro.cc could really use for its depot.

    Maybe I'll make this...

    How many graphics are missing? I didn't go through the whole list but is everything there, gui, highscore, pause, cursor, logo etc? Whats missing and still needs to be done graphicaly?

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  7. Everything should be there that I can think of. I'm sure you'll run across one or two graphics that are missing, but there is also a cache of misc powerups that should hold you over in a pinch.

    Keep me updated if anything happens.

    take care
    Danc.

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  8. Hm, I can't decode your palette... unix reports it as an IFF type but I don't have something that'll convert it to a bitmap. Is there any way you could put the palette into a .bmp file that supports palettes?

    I also have readers for lbm, pcx, and tga if one of those are easier..

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  9. Man do I feel dumb, I just spent about 2 hours decoding pal.tmp in your zip file into a proper palette and transforming it every way i could think of (reversing it, clipping it, clipping and reversing it etc) and was about to try reversing the bit order when I realized the .bmp files themselves had palettes in them.

    Anyway..

    I'll get back to you if I get around to putting this game together.

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  10. Hi!

    Another one from the allegro.cc-community! I am currently doing a game using your graphics! Check out the screenshot (not the best):
    http://www.imaxcs.com/screenshot.jpg

    It will not really resemble the old Sinistar, but be more like Freespace, but in 2D.

    If you even want to download the demo:
    http://www.imaxcs.com/fighters.zip

    In this demo, you have to pursue the other (lightbrown) ship and destroy it in order to win.
    Controls are:
    WASD or cursor-keys to move, space to shoot.

    bye,
    Maximilian Csuk

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  11. Hi there,

    Just to let you know I put your sinistar graphics to use ;)

    Results can seen here

    http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?t=3957

    Or downloaded straight from here

    www.orangepeel.co.nz/cabal/Cabal.zip

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  12. Very cool. A fun little game! Do you have any ideas on where to take it next?

    take care
    Danc.

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  13. I will probably leave it as is. I rather like it. I have included the source code for any delphi developers or noobs who want to have a go at changing.

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  14. I am going to use these for my first game project at school. I'll be sure to drop a link to Lost Garden, THANK YOU!

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  15. Hi Dan,

    Sorry to bug you about an almost 3 year old post, but we would like to include some of these graphics in a commercial game, would there be any problem with that?

    The terms here and in your other posts with graphics sets seem pretty open, but I wouldn't want to overstep the mark.

    And while I'm here, thank you so much for sharing your experience on this blog, it's the one thing in my feed reader these days that I get really excited about.

    Cheers,

    Gavin

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  16. Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the great graphics. I'm using some of the Sinistar graphics in a shooter for Pocket PC / Windows mobile devices. You can see my progress at www.mobizoo.co.uk.

    Thanks again.

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  17. A few of the images seem to have not survived. They have huge green streaks through them.

    Factory4.bmp
    Items.bmp
    Options.bmp
    Options2.bmp

    The Items.bmp seems to be most important as there are a lot of little icons on that one that can't be salvaged.

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  18. What's the license on these sprites? Are they free to use for any purpose, commercial or otherwise?

    Thanks!

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  19. The "Items.bmp" look really weird. Is there some mistake?

    Cheers

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  20. I discovered an awesome puzzle game that uses graphics from this pack: waymark

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  21. I would like to share my minesweeper clone I made using these wonderful graphics:

    http://elvenprogrammer.themanaworld.org/2010/11/ka-boom/

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  22. So, is there any word on the images Deozaan mentioned? Is it just a corrupted bmp header, or is the data itself toasted? Do you still have a working original you can zip up? The rest of the graphics are so brilliant (along with everything else of yours I've seen) I hate for any of it to be lost because of a stupid computer! Plus, I have a game idea I'd like to mock-up with the "items.bmp" images.

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  23. Hi,

    needed some test graphics for some tools I was working on.

    Ended up using these.

    You can find "cleaned up" versions here:
    https://github.com/AndreasOM/LostGarden

    Mostly cropping to size and fitting our naming scheme.

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  24. I am working on a game using these and I really appreciate it, http://lonespace.com. Its my frist attempt at a video game. Should have a demo up soon.

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  25. Well, I created something out of it... :-)

    Here it is :-)

    http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/killerchip/2732399

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