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Play Sketch Nation Studio, publish title you created in-game, profit
Making games is hard. Making games that make money is exponentially more difficult, but even that doomed opportunity isn't possible without first overcoming the initial problem -- making games is hard.We've tracked the emotional and economic expense of making a game without a publisher, devoted backers or rich family members, and the personal sacrifice involved in devoting oneself to a passion of game creation is now in the glaring public light. Engineous Games wants to take some of the pain out of programming with its new app, Sketch Nation Studio, set to debut at the end of March for iOS devices, Engineous founder Nitzan Wilnai told Joystiq at GDC.Studio is the follow-up to Sketch Nation Shooter, an app released in 2011 that allows users to draw their own creations and put them into a game instantly. Shooter sold 800,000 copies at $0.99 a pop, saw 100,000 games created and 10,000 available for sharing across the network. Studio takes the premise of Shooter one step further, and allows users to have their games published through Engineous on the App Store with a tap of a button.Engineous will publish each applicable title for $0.99, and after Apple takes its standard 30 percent, Engineous and the Studio developer will split profits 50-50, each seeing $0.35 of every sale. Sell 1,000 copies and get $350; sell 10,000 and get $3,500. That's not a bad reward for simply playing a game, but it gets better -- Sketch Nation Studio is free.
iPhone It In: Sketch Nation Shooter
The iPhone App Store is littered with small-minded games. Sure, they may be fun, but they're far too often devoid of any real, long-lasting appeal. Sketch Nation Shooter is more than just the antithesis of those games ... it's the antidote. SNS not only allows you to use your iPhone to create a game from the ground up, but also gives free access to the multitude of games that others have already made. And did I mention it's just a buck?
Over 800 Sketch Nation Shooter games created so far on the iPhone
Ever since I first played Sketch Nation Shooter back at GDC, this is what I've been waiting for -- a chance to see what the masses are doing with this wacky little game creation tool on the iPhone. In the app, players can make up their own graphics and assign their own rules to enemies and items within the top-down shooter genre, eventually creating their own full shooter game. And with over 800 games out there in the app, you can see that things are already getting creative in the video above. I love the bug spray one, and the magnet one is pretty brilliant, too. And there's even a "bullet hell" tribute in there -- that kind of game isn't my thing, but it's very interesting that these games are running the gamut from super casual to very hardcore. Creator Nitzan Wilnai says he's been overwhelmed by the response. He says that an update to the game is coming which will allow these games to be shared on Facebook as well, so we'll probably see even more of these come out in the future. If you haven't bought the app yet (it's 99 cents on the App Store), all of these games are both created by and playable in the app, and you can even share them with friends and rate them yourself. Very cool idea -- it'll be interesting to see if Wilnai eventually comes up with some more "Sketch Nation" genres. It'd be wild to use this system to design a game around some dungeon crawler or racing game rules.
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.
