Sketch Raider. Think ‘Tron’ vs ‘Pictionary’.

If you fancy something different, please check out our latest release 'Sketch Raider Lite', available free from the Android Market.

This is our entry into the AIR App Challenge. It was live in the Android market on Thursday night, then tweaked, adjusted, and finally submitted to the competition website at 6.30am GMT on Saturday (90 minutes before the deadline - phew!).

It uses the Flickr API (courtesy of the ActionScript 3 Flickr library) to request photos based on a well-crafted query, then presents these photos as outlined 'sketches' for the player to identify.

To give this game mechanic a context, and give the game an objective, the idea is that these images are the reconstructed remains of password 'hints' that people have left on a computer system.

Your cyber companion, Chie (the girl in the corner),  recovers these images and presents them to you with 4 possible answers. If you guess correctly, you capture a data tile - basically a square on a 3d board which represents a computer network.

Each level of the game is a different network map. The player must capture a chain of tiles in order to link up their home tile to one or more targets (represented by the big memory blocks in the screenshots).

At the same time, enemy agents in the form of viruses and other rogue software are moving about the system, claiming tiles for themselves. Therein lies the strategy - to navigate your way past the bad guys in order to complete your chain. Sometimes you have to plan ahead and capture a tile out of sequence in order to head-off trouble early on.

Extra help is available in the form of upgrades for your AI companion, Chie. These manifest themselves as 'lifelines' which you can use to the help crack difficult passwords e.g. removing 2 wrong answers, resetting the password to get a new set of clues etc.

Upgrades must first be activated by linking them to your home tile on the map. They are the microchip-like tiles in the screenshots. Upgrades must be recharged after each use too, which takes several turns, but can be speeded up by capturing more tiles.

The screenshot below shows the layout when played on the forthcoming 'Sony P' splitscreen tablet. On this device the control pad is split apart and the game is controlled with the player's thumbs, Nintendo DS-style.

Enjoy the 10 free levels in the Lite version, and special thanks to Pixelrehab for the graphics and design!