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Trailer Review: Scribblenauts

Posted by Derrick Sanskrit

Last Friday, IGN was treated to the exclusive reveal of the new DS title from 5th Cell, the young developer with mostly mobile phone games under their belt. Why is this worth an exclusive reveal? Because 5th Cell's last two games, 2007's Drawn To Life and 2008's Lock's Quest, both for the Nintendo DS, were wildly exciting experiments in game design and interaction. Most notably, Drawn To Life delivered on the dreams of many DS gamers by asking the player to use the touchscreen to draw various elements throughout the game world, including the protagonist and their weapons and vehicles. The game was such a fresh new concept that 5th Cell licensed their engine to publisher THQ for a Spongebob Squarepants spin-off and an upcoming Wii version.

So how do they follow-up on a game that let players draw pretty much whatever they wanted in an admittedly limited capacity? Well... it's kind of hard to explain... Here, just watch this trailer for Scribblenauts and prepare to be buried under a mountain of brand-new gameplay ideas:

I didn't really think it would be possible to be excited about physically writing in a video game, but here we are, and that is kind of awesome. In the interview with IGN's Matt Bozon, 5th Cell co-founder and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka said of Scribblenauts:

We've got this tool that we created in-house called "Objectnaut", so now designers can put in any name of any object, and put in all sorts of data. We're talking AI properties, physical properties, attraction and repulsion to other objects, weight, size, where it splits, can you pick it up, is it flammable or how do elements effect it… really all these things that you need. We're spending a great deal of time just imputing tons and tons of these objects, and once we flesh it all out with this Objectnaut system, we have a hierarchy of data.

Let's look at an elephant, for example. It's an animal – a mammal – so we know that. It has organic flesh therefore, since every mammal has organic flesh. Now we don't have to write that in for every animal we make, the system just knows to attach that to anything we label "animal." We can then look at it and say "organic flesh can… well, it can be eaten, right?"

But...that's insane, right? I mean, this is a game, you can't possibly have everything in there. Surely there's only a list of like twenty-four objects I can use however I want, right? Not so, says monsieur Slaczka:

"We can't have copyrighted materials, and we won't do anything vulgar, but outside of that people are going to be really happy, and really surprised. I mean we've spent three months of just hardcore list-making. A gigantic excel sheet of just going through dictionaries, and going through encyclopedias, and just grabbing anything and everything there is to get. Find and define every object. We have things in here that are so obscure that I don't think people are going to ever find them unless we release official lists someday. People won't write half the things that exist in this game because they're so obscure. You just don't think of them."

Wowzers. Well... that's certainly impressive.

Obviously, we haven't seen enough of this game yet toreally have any idea what the full game is going to be like, but Jeremiah does say that the game is still the better part of a year away from completion, and that is plenty of time for finesse and polish. Scribblenauts may just wind up being one of the most adventurous game designs of this generation with the potential of being one heck of an amazing game to boot. Now, however, we play the waiting game.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Terrifying New Mirror's Edge Content
The Chase - Felix Meets Felicity
Yakuza 3
Dragon Quest IX
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Retro Game Challenge
Golden Axe: Beast Rider
House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter IV
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

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Posted Dec 08 2008, 10:00 AM

Filed under: nintendo ds, trailer review, derrick sanskrit, drawn to life, 5th cell, scribblenauts

Comments

Amber Ahlborn said:

Absolutely fantastic. I've been waiting to see what these folks would do after Drawn to Life. I'll be watching this one.

December 8, 2008 4:44 PM

Derrick Sanskrit said:

Lock's Quest was a beautifully polished game. After a few days with it I remembered how much I suck at real-time-strategy games, but that first day or so of competently fighting off clockwork zombies was really fun.

The interview also says that only about half of the 5th Cell staff are working on Scribblenauts. I can only assume this means the other half are working on something else that's flipping awesome (maybe a WiiWare debut?).

December 8, 2008 5:03 PM

Demaar said:

Holy wow, that looks awesome. I think I may have to check out their previous games.

December 13, 2008 1:09 PM

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John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

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