As promised, Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest developer 5th Cell has announced its newest Nintendo DS game. It's called Scribblenauts and it may be one of the most fascinating games for the handheld. Ever.
Scribblenauts may look like a traditional thing-collecting platformer, but it uses the Nintendo DS's touchscreen in an awe-inspiring way. When faced with an obstacle, a puzzle to solve, simply write what you would like to use to solve said puzzle. Need to grab something from a tree? Write "l-a-d-d-e-r" and one appears. Or write "b-e-a-v-e-r" and watch that beaver gnaw it to the ground. Problem solved.
The first look at IGN clues us in to how this mechanic is possible.
It may make more sense when you watch the first trailer of the DS game in action, but you may have just as many questions about how this is technically feasible. Fortunately, IGN said down with 5th Cell's co-founder and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka to get an explanation.
"As Maxwell you have to grab in-level objects called Starites, and to do that you can write anything you want, and it'll spawn that object," Slaczka said. "So if there's a Starite in the tree, you could write "ladder" and then a ladder would spawn. Climb up the ladder, and you grab the Starite."
Slaczka says that there's more to it than just that. "You could write 'axe', and then cut the tree down using the object you spawned. You could write 'shuriken' and throw that at the Starite in the tree and knock it down. It's all based on real physics and interaction, so there's nothing pre-canned. You could write anything though; imagine you write "goldfish" for some reason, well a goldfish would spawn and sit on the ground. It wouldn't help you at all in that puzzle, but you could do it."
And you could maybe even put a laser on shark and have that laser shark shoot an elephant. The possibilities sound endless and we can't wait to try it out for ourselves.