Alright, not sure how many people paid attention to the 5th Cell earlier this week (developers of Drawn to Life which was awesome and Lock's Quest which is also awesome) when they announced that they would be making an announcement on Friday. Well, that announcement came and went, and left IGN with an interview about session about their new title, Scribblenauts. Before, continuing, here is the interview which also has the embedded world premiere trailer:
http://ds.ign.com/articles/936/936157p1.htmlOk, so basically, you play the role of a curious character call Maxwell, who for some reason has to collect these "things" called Starites. Thing is, the Starites dont' make it easy for Maxwell to obtain them and across tons of levels, Maxwell will have to figure out how to get them down. How is this accomplished? Just as in the trailer, the player wrote down "ladder" and a ladder appeared allowing Maxwell to scale the tree and obtain the Starite. Sounds simple and all things considered, especially their former project Drawn to Life, most would assume this to be a canned/planned occurrence. According to 5th Cell however, it's far more dynamic than that. The game's creative director (and co founder of 5th Cell) makes the bold claim that essentially if you can think it, you can write it and you can use it. Just as in the trailer, they showed three different ways to solve the same puzzle. The end result is what matters (obtaining the Starite) but how people go about doing as much is only limited by their imagination, in a manner of speaking. They explain to some degree exactly how their system works noting that every object has certain AI, properties, physics and interactions (the works) attached to them so that they behave as realistically as possible. If you want a burning bush, you can't create it by writing burning bush. There are some execptions made such as copyrighted terms/names, vulgar statements, etc. that aren't possible and adjectives and the like won't work. If you want a burning bush, you create a bush, then create a torch then torch the bush. Voila!
Anyway, the interview is chock full of information on the game and there is really no single passage I could quote that would get the point across. I've been reading Neogaf the past half hour and there are people utterly astounded or in disbelief that something like this is not only possible, but possible on the Nintendo DS. Some are still in the "this is bullshit" phase. Still, a very cool concept and certainly shows 5th Cell is no one trick pony when it comes to game development or making some truly innovative concepts shine on the Nintendo DS. Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest are great examples of that and I'm looking forward to Scribblenauts.
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Scribblenauts - "If you can think it, you can write it."