Sketch Nation Shooter has been a game on our radar for a while now, since we had a chance to play it at GDC 2009 and preview it in December. The wait is finally over as Sketch Nation Shooter [AppStore] has been released and ready for your creative ingenuity! In the developer’s words:
[Sketch Nation] allows users to create their own games by drawing a player, enemies and a level on a piece of paper and taking a picture of the drawing with their iPhone camera. Users can then share their creations with their friends and other users. Our unique image recognition technology automatically detects the objects drawn and calculates collision boundaries. Sketch Nation Shooter is the only game to incorporate the iPhone camera in such a way. iPod Touch users can import their drawings through the Photo Library. After the drawings are imported into the game, users will be able to place enemies and powerups as well as set their properties in our easy to use in-game editor and then play with their unique creations.
Our initial impressions with Sketch Nation Shooter have confirmed what we hoped for, with a comprehensive level editing system that offers a range of options for customizing your own creations. We are especially delighted to see there is the option for a ‘Simple’ and ‘Advanced’ degree of customization, ensuring even those that want to create something to show their friends on the fly, like our TouchArcade mascot fighting Eli’s giant evil guy on wheels that you can see in the screenshot above (sorry, we had to leave out the ‘wheels’ to keep the site kid-friendly!)
From out of the box, Sketch Nation Shooter provides a few developer-created levels that are far beyond anything we hope to create ourselves, but are confident that the masses will have trumped in no time. The actual shooter gameplay is straightforward, with several weapon power-ups, shields and and bosses with a variety of attack patterns all evident in our play through.
We’ll have more on the actual nuts and bolts of the game once we’ve spent some more time with it. We especially want to see what you guys manage to do with the platform. Discuss the game with other TouchArcade members and share pictures of your creations in our forum thread. The game is priced at only $0.99.
App Store Link: Sketch Nation Shooter, $0.99.
