It's puzzling as to why there aren't more drawing games on the Wii U, as the GamePad lends itself to this style of competitive gameplay. Just a few weeks ago, GameZone interviewed Retroid Interactive about PictoParty, which can still boast that it's one of the only drawing games for the platform alongside Game & Wario's 'Sketch' mode. More recently, though, another independent developer by the name of Wildcard Studios decided to present their own take in the form of Sketch Wars, a multiplayer party game exclusive to the Wii U eShop.
Sketch Wars, which launched last Thursday, was not created with the sole intention to be among the first to address a market gap. As GameZone learned in an interview with Christopher Vann, CEO of Wildcard Studios, it was more purely about filling a personal need. "I have always wanted to create a game similar to that of Draw Something," Vann shared, "as me and the fiancé love those types of games." Rather than strongly mimicing what's already been done, Vann sought to build an experience on instantaneous feedback, an element he felt was missing from Draw Something and other games in his usual rotation. "Draw Something was either too slow in terms of swinging around turns, [or] if one of us missed a notification…the game could take forever." For that reason, Vann refers to his creation as a "real-time, multiplayer, competitive version" of the hit mobile game.
With Sketch Wars' basic premise being on the same level as other drawing games, standing out might have proved a challenge — if this were on a platform other than Wii U, where, again, few drawing games exist. "I don’t see Sketch Wars having too much competition," he said frankly. And even with this aspect of content packages with similar traits, Sketch Wars has price on its side (i.e., $4.99 US/$6.99 CDN, compared with $7.99 US/$9.99 CDN for PictoParty). Yet, the same multiplayer focus that compelled Vann to create the experience is what ultimately accounts for its merit in the scheme of things.
"Me and [a] couple friends have game nights and needed something like this with a competitive edge for fun," Vann shared. "With that in mind, I have added a tournament mode that can have up to five teams of five people." Having the structure to accommodate 20 people certainly solidifies the game's potential as a party game from a quantitative standpoint, putting it in the same camp as a game like Spin the Bottle: Bumpie's Party, which delivers on a similar group-play appeal. Vann also shared with GameZone that Sketch Wars features a mode that breaks away from the drawing norm to introduce an acting component. "Instead of drawing your chosen item from a category," he said, "the person holding the GamePad must act out the word chosen without speaking."
To get the game to market, the challenges Wildcard Studios had to overcome weren't of a technical nature, but instead had to do with being selective over what words to feature. "The biggest challenge was locating a large database of categories and…filtering them of things that wouldn’t fit," he said. In some cases, there are more than 2,000 words under a single category, which Vann says made eliminating words from a safe list "a bit daunting."
The team will be monitoring feedback on Miiverse for bug reports and requests for future content, with the possibility of an update at a later date. And unlike PictoParty's Miiverse community, where screenshots have been disabled, Wildcard Studios encourages players to share their favorite rushed drawings.
Now accepting your best pictorial representations of the word "astronomical."
