SketchNationShooter
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TUAW's Daily App: Sketch Nation Shooter
Sketch Nation Shooter actually came out a little while ago, and it's not so much a game as it is a game engine; it allows anyone with a pen and paper to create enemies and turn them into shoot 'em up video games. I was duly impressed with the title at release, but the latest update has really upped the ante; it allows anyone to download and browse the hottest in-app games without requiring a Facebook login. Additionally, the imaging system has been updated, which means the graphics should look better than ever, and a few other bugs got fixed and tweaked. Sketch Nation Shooter is just 99 cents on the App Store, and it's definitely worth seeing if you like this game genre. What Engineous Games has created here is really impressive. It's also good to see that there are updates coming out that answer to issues fans have had with the game. In-app purchasing allows you to buy packs of graphics to use in your own games, but you don't really need them. Just draw a picture, use the camera, and start shooting.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Sketch Nation Shooter
When I was reminded of its name at GDC, I couldn't recall hearing much about Engineous Games. It's the development studio founded by Nitzan Wilnai, a former software developer at EA and Yahoo who's gone to work making iPhone games for himself. But I did recall Engenious' first title, Tatomic, which I wrote about a while ago -- it was a great puzzler that put a new spin on Tetris' falling block gameplay. Unfortunately, despite my purchase, Tatomic didn't sell as well as Wilnai would have liked, so he's decided to "create a game that would sell itself." It's called Sketch Nation Shooter, and he sat down to show it to me last week in San Francisco. He started off the demo by promising that he would make a game for me in two minutes, and sure enough, 98 seconds later, he had a custom spaceship shooter game up and running, as you can see in the photo above.
