Design Your Own iPhone Shmup

The iPhone has been getting its share of shoot-em-ups of late. Engineous Games’s Sketch Nation Shooter is the second one to be announced this week. What sets it apart from EspGaluda II, though, is that Sketch Nation Shooter is a shmup design suite, rather than a game.

You can import art assets either by taking pictures of your drawings with the iPhone camera, or by importing them through the photo library. If creating art isn’t one of your strong points, you can use one of the default art packs available in the game, or download someone else’s Sketch Nation project and use their assets instead.

Once you’ve done that, you can decide where to place enemies, power-ups and level obstacles. The in-game editor even allows you to choose different weapon patterns. This screen shows the parameters you can set for a boss battle.

Sketch Nation Shooter costs $0.99 on the App Store. Enginous included an online ranking feature and the ability to connect with Facebook,
in addition to being able to trade your Sketch
Nation games online.