Scribblenauts can do pretty much anything. We were a little worried at first that it would just be a delicious concept and not much more, but it's a blast from start to finish. Yes it's fiddly in places, with the controls often not being precise enough, but it's the most original game you'll play this year. Technical Director Marius Fahlbusch talks us through the process that led to us writing stuff like 'giraffe', 'glue' and 'chainsaw' with genuinely hilarious results.
ONM: How long did it take to develop the game from the initial concept to finished product?
MF: The original concept came up during the development of Lock's Quest. Then the development took about eight months of internal, self-funded development and after that the time was right to work with Warner Bros. So in total, a little more than a year.
ONM: How did the decision to hook up with Warner Bros. come about?
MF: There was lots of interest from a lot of publishers, and we were just looking for the best match for this game. Warner came along and we thought it was the perfect match. They understood the game and really wanted to push it.
ONM: It must have been quite tricky to establish some boundaries for the game, and a difficulty level. Was it a challenge deciding what would help the game, and what would break it?
MF: Yeah, balancing the game was really difficult, especially since you can spawn anything you want. As far as levels go, we have a large list of all the systems there are in the game - just to name a few: physics, temperature, electricity, AI, and so on. And then the designers looked at that list and we tried to demo all of those aspects in the levels. We didn't want to just have the same idea over and over again.
We really wanted to capture the idea of taking advantage of the system and make sure everything is projected to the player in some way. The initial levels across the first worlds were kept quite simple to get you into the game. So, for example, the Starite is in the tree or the cat is on the rooftop - how do you get it down? Simple scenarios like that. Then it ramps up quickly as the player learns how to manipulate the system. The last few maps are quite large and very challenging.
ONM: How did you go about finalising the in-game dictionary?
MF: There are tens of thousands of words that the game recognises. Of course, everything copyrighted couldn't make it in unfortunately, nor could vulgar terms - which disappointed a few people, but that's the way it is. People often ask us if this or that is in the game, but a lot of the time we don't know, as the dictionary is so vast. You would have to type it in yourself to find out. We can't possibly keep it all in our heads!
ONM: What's your favourite object?
MF: I like 'lolwut' a lot. There's a Maxwell head that you can put on anything - put it on a baby if you like. Spaghetti Cat is another funny one. When we started this whole YouTube thing, we started with Spaghetti Cat. We saw a lot of people on the web getting very excited so when one of our designers came to me and said 'we have a bug in Spaghetti Cat', he had a white face. We didn't want to let anyone down. Putting memes like that into the game really took off and we just kept putting more and more in. I don't even know how many YouTube cats are included in the game now.
ONM: Are there ideas that had to be left out?
MF: The gameplay itself hasn't really changed too much throughout. There might have been a few tweaks here and there and a few iterations of certain objects to make them more fun and balance them out, but the system of the game didn't really change.
ONM: Are you pleased with the reception the game's had?
MF: We always hoped that the game would be well received. In the beginning, when we had the idea, it just clicked for both Jeremiah (the creative director) and myself. To get to what we have now wasn't easy but we both had the idea at the same time and saw the whole game right in front of us. There might have been a few changes to the game between now and then, but basically the idea was in our heads from the very beginning. It was a really magical moment because we knew that this was a special game, but neither of us could have imagined what happened when we showed the game at E3. It completely blew us away.
ONM: What's next for 5th Cell? What about a Wii version of Scribblenauts?
MF: It would certainly be interesting to do the game for the Wii, but for the moment we are concentrating on Scribblenauts for DS. We're always looking to do something new, something that hasn't been done before. We're going to continue on that path.
