GraFighters: draw your own character

GraFighters: draw your own character

This article also appeared on SearchCowboys.

 GraFighters is a new free game with an amazingly simple concept: you draw a creature, upload a picture of your masterpiece to the game, give it a name and watch it engage in deadly battle which other characters produced in the same way.

The game was created by two college friends Eric Cleckner and David Chenell, who must have spent boring school hours doodling and sketching. Inspired by the question "which of our drawings would win in a fight?" they came up with the concept for GraFighters: draw your character and make it fight!

Eric and David pitched their idea on Kickstarter, a fundraising platform which supports creative projects by crowd funding, - but couldn't raise the $20,000 they needed. Luckily, soon enough they received a $200,000 investment from a venture capitalist, which allowed bringing the game to life.

GraFighters is already available as a browser game or an app for iPhone and Android - all free. It's based on the freemium business model which dominates the mobile market at the moment: you can use the app for free and purchase additional features for small amounts of money. The marketplace tab on GraFighters is not yet available, but the preview screen suggests that you will be able upgrade your monsters by purchasing different weapons.

I had to try it, of course, so I made a character using my own creation from a long time ago. Behold the mighty Eagle:

After a couple of steps my sketch turned into the below character, looking at me from the screen and slightly waving his wings preparing for battle.

I'm proud to say that the Eagle won his first fight, despite the fact that on the battlefield he ended up looking like a wireframe (I should have left him white when cleaning up the uploaded picture).

Here you can watch GraFighters pitch video where the game is introduces by its creators. But if you have any kind of sketch that could work as a character, you should definitely try it for yourself… and if you do, challenge the Eagle! 

• Door Tamara Yadvichuk
• Gepost op 13 Apr, 2012