This game sounds fucking awesome.
http://ds.ign.com/articles/936/936157p1.htmlIGN: OK. Before we do anything else, fill everyone in on what Scribblenauts is, and how in the heck this game will work. It's a really unique one, so feel free to fire away.
Miah: Scribblenauts is about creation and imagination really. It's our biggest DS title to date, and after spending a lot of time on Lock's Quest and on Drawn to Life, we ended up learning a lot. This is the culmination of everything we've learned as far as understanding how DS works, working visually, technically, and everything along those lines from concept to execution.
What Scribblenauts is about in a nutshell is basically "Anything you write, you can use." That's where the concept really came from. It's the idea of "What if you had all these puzzles, and in order to solve them you can write anything; the limit is your imagination." How you do that is through this character Maxwell. 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. 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.
There're more ways of doing it though obviously. 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.
IGN: Haha. Ok, so take us through how a full level would work; user interface, gameplay
What does the player see when they kick off a level of Scribblenauts? Can you really write anything? Is there a bank of "allowed" words?Miah:Yeah, the basis of the level is pretty simple. It's all stylus based, so you can tap anywhere and Maxwell will move there, or you tap anything and Maxwell will have interaction with it automatically, so if it's a sword he'll know how to pick it up and then know when it's in his hand and know on the fly that he can now "attack" or "chop" something with it since it's a bladed too, basically. So there's a little notepad icon at the upper right of the screen, and once you tap that a little pad comes down and you can literally write anything. There's also a keypad in there, so if you don't want to use your own writing you can just key it on in, and once you hit Ok as long as you spell it correctly will spawn in the world. Use it however you would normally use it ladder like a ladder, string like a string, car like a car how it works in the real world is how it'll work in Scribblenauts.
A couple screenshots:
