Scribblenauts is an emergent puzzle action video game developed by 5th Cell and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the Nintendo DS. The game was released in 2009 in all regions except Japan, and in 2011 in Japan as by Konami. It is the third Nintendo DS video game made by 5th Cell, the first two being Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest. The objective of Scribblenauts, as implied by its catchphrase "Write Anything, Solve Everything", is to complete puzzles to collect "Starites", helped by the player's ability to summon any object (from a database of tens of thousands) by writing its name on the touchscreen. The game is considered by its developers to help promote emergent gameplay by challenging the player to solve its puzzles within certain limitations or through multiple solutions.
Jeremiah Slaczka, creator and director of Scribblenauts, envisioned the game as a combination of solving life situation puzzles alongside Mad Libs. His vision was brought to realization through the "Objectnaut" engine created by 5th Cell's technical director, Marius Fahlbusch. Objectnaut allowed for a data driven approach, and a significant portion of the development time was spent researching nouns and their properties, and categorizing them into the Objectnaut database. This, along with the simple art designs of 5th Cell's Edison Yan, allowed for the team to easily add new words to the database without expending much effort to program new behavior.
Scribblenauts was first shown in a playable form at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, and became a sleeper hit, winning several "Best of Show" awards, being the first portable console title to win such praise. Reviewers believed that 5th Cell delivered on their promise to allow nearly any possible object to be created for use in Scribblenauts, but also lamented that the choice of controls in the game hampered their full enjoyment of the title. The success of the title has led to a number of sequels including Super Scribblenauts, Scribblenauts Remix, and Scribblenauts Unlimited. The series has sold over 13 million copies.
Gameplay
Scribblenauts is an exclusively side-scrolling game controlled almost entirely with the Nintendo DS stylus, with the D-pad and face buttons controlling the camera and the left and right shoulder buttons rotating objects. The player controls a character named Maxwell, who must collect objects called "Starites" to complete each level. Maxwell is guided by tapping the touchscreen, or if the player taps an object, Maxwell will pick it up or be given other options for interacting with that object, such as riding a horse or bicycle or shooting at an object if he holds a weapon. A fundamental element of Scribblenauts is the ability of the player to summon myriad objects into the game. This is achieved by writing the name of an object on the touchscreen. For example, the player can write "ladder", summoning a ladder, which the player may use to climb to an out-of-reach Starite. The player may turn the ladder on its side and set it on fire. The player may also chain objects together, such as chaining a piece of meat to a pole and holding it while riding on a raptor.
Summoned objects range among animals, weapons, forces of nature, famous people (both fictional and real), vehicles, household objects, easter eggs of the development team, and even internet memes. However, the game does not include trademarked terms, nor potential profanity (summoning "ass" will spawn a donkey; summoning "cock" will spawn a rooster). The game includes a homonym system to offer the player possible choices between similar-sounding objects, such as distinguishing between a toy balloon and a hot-air balloon; there is also a spellchecker to provide close matches for misspelled words. The North American release includes support for other languages including Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Spanish, with French-Canadian and Latin American variants available for words in the French and Spanish language sets, respectively. The UK version also accounts for difference between American and British English, such as the differing meanings of the word "football". 5th Cell has stated that the limit to what objects may be summoned is up to the player's imagination. Players, using special software, claimed to have discovered that the full list of words tallies at 22,802 unique entries. In response, Slaczka said: "That was leaked by a hacker who does not know anything. It's more than that".
The game is segmented into 220 levels over 10 themed areas with 22 levels per world, and each given a 4 star ranking based on its difficulty, with later areas featuring more high ranked levels. Puzzles are given a par for the number of objects they can summon, typically being between two and four, though the player is free to summon more, so long as there is space in the meter at the top screen (summoning the same number of objects as the par or less earns more points). There are two types of levels—puzzle and action levels. Puzzle levels are real-life situations (such as having to open a piñata) where the Starite is awarded once the puzzle is solved, while action levels will appeal to gamers that prefer side-scrolling platformers, featuring switches, spike traps, and other similar elements. Players are awarded "merits" for completing levels while meeting certain requirements, such as not summoning any weapon-like object. Once the player completes a level, a silver star appears on the level selection button and a "Free play" mode is unlocked. At that point, the player is given the option to play through the level three consecutive times without reusing objects. Successfully completing the challenge grants the player a gold star for that level. Scribblenauts presents a simplistic storyline, as the developers wished to focus on engaging gameplay. The game always rewards the player with "Ollars", its in-game money, to allow them to purchase new areas, different avatars and other visual changes to the game.
The game includes a level editor, allowing users to share these levels over the Nintendo Wi-Fi system. The player can start with any level that they have already beaten from the main game, and add new objects with new game properties. These new properties can vary significantly from the normal behavior, such as having a bear able to eat a plane.
Development
Scribblenauts was first conceived in the second quarter of 2007, near the same time that they had envisioned Lock's Quest. Creative Director for 5th Cell, Jeremiah Slaczka, stated that they were seeking counterparts of Nintendogs and Brain Age, games that had attracted a much wider demographic than most other niche games, that 5th Cell could develop. The concept of Scribblenauts came from a combination of a previous idea he had for the DS that was similar to Mad Libs and a dream of his. An example given for the Mad Libs was that players could write a Mad Lib of a "dog walking through a forest", and a dog would appear in a forest and walk through it, but he realized the game would be tedious and that players would only be interested in using keywords. The dream was of being inside an Aztec temple and having to solve puzzles; one in particular involved three paintings, with the objective being straightening them and then moving on to the next room through a portal. While he thought it was a good idea for a game, he also felt that it lacked both a hook and replayability. He debated whether this would work best on the Wii or the DS, but later decided to combine the writing element with a puzzle element to fix the lack of replayability. Slaczka realized that the concept of the game might be considered impossible by other programmers, but found that 5th Cell's Technical Director Marius Fahlbusch felt confident they could create the required elements. The developers considered that the nature of the flexible and sometimes unforeseen solutions made the game strongly promote emergent gameplay.
During development, Slaczka and the team tried to figure out what they could do with the DS hardware, trying to make Scribblenauts appeal to everyone. As Lock's Quest was thought of first, they focused on releasing that game first while beginning the development of Scribblenauts. The game entered beta around May 2009, and had numerous play-testers exploring the game. About half of 5th Cell's staff worked on the game. It was developed alongside the DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter.
Scribblenauts was originally developed without having a publisher for the game. Slaczka noted that unlike other games where the developers could complete and polish a single level to garner interest while work on the rest of the game continued, Scribblenauts needed to show support for its large dictionary from the start, making it difficult to promote the game. The company was in negotiations with a publisher in the early part of 2009, letting that publisher decide when it would be best to announce the game. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment officially became the publisher for Scribblenauts that May. Slaczka noted that of the other publishers they talked to, they felt Warner Bros. was the best one, particularly due to their proximity to 5th Cell and their interest in the title.
Scribblenauts was originally titled "Wordplay", but the team felt that this was "generic". The title Scribblenauts began as a temporary name that would be effective for pitching the game, but as development proceeded, the team couldn't think of a better one, so the name stuck and became the final title of the product.
Konami published the game in Japan in January 2011; this localized version features Konami characters such as Old Snake, Manaka Takane and the Vic Viper.
Engine The core engine of Scribblenauts is a data-driven engine called "Objectnaut" created by Fahlbusch. Within Objectnaut, each object is given a set of properties, including physical characteristics, artificial intelligence behavior, and how the player (through Maxwell) can interact with it. Five people from the team spent six months researching dictionaries and encyclopedias to create a large database of objects within the Objectnaut's framework, and then mapped out a hierarchy of data from this information. For example, every mammal-based object in the game is given the property of having "organic flesh", allowing it to be eaten or turned into meat, without having to specify these functions for each type of mammal they used. The Objectnaut approach allowed the team to create two distinct objects for words that may have similar meanings simply by adjusting each word's properties in the database: "lion", "tiger" and "leopard" while similar will behave differently and have different art assets, while the only difference in the game between "croissant" and "danish" is that the danish may be able to roll like a wheel. The team made sure to balance the abilities of the various objects that could be summoned to avoid creating an "uber character" that would act as a skeleton key for solving all of the levels, and give players more courage to try different elements. Slaczka noted that he would be frequently asked if certain difficult words were in the game when interviewed by the press, most of the time being able to respond affirmatively to these questions. In an example given by Slaczka, a "hardcore" journalist wanted twenty minutes with the game to try to stump it during the 2009 E3 convention, but, according to Slaczka, "he had a real hard time stumping it and shook my hand" after that period.