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Word Play
There aren’t quite enough games that cater to the dictionary fetishists inside us. Bookworm Adventures satiated the multi-syllabic pangs for a while, allowing us to slap down mythical creatures with 12 letters – count them, Dracula – of metallic synonym.
Thankfully, Scribblenauts looks to fill the gap, a new DS game from 5th Cell, the makers of Drawn To Life and Lock’s Quest. Players solve puzzles by writing in nearly any noun they can think of, and seeing the item appear in the game ready for use. An early demo sees the hero, Maxwell, trying to get a star out of a tree – spawning a ladder at first then, in later attempts, an American football to knock the
star down and a beaver to gnaw through the trunk. We talk to Jeremiah Slaczka, creative director, about the power of words.
Edge: Can you describe how comprehensive the lexicon is?
Slaczka: That’s the million-dollar question that people keep asking me. But if we told you exactly how many words we have it’d be like a magician revealing his tricks – but let’s just say it is incredibly comprehensive. We’re going through dictionaries, encyclopaedias, wikis – everything we can get our hands on. We’ve already spent months and months on this, and until the project ends we’re going to be adding new words and art and new data to go with all that.
There are so many obscure words. There will definitely be things that you could write that you won’t be able to spawn – but those things will never matter, like some eastern Columbian dish that nobody’s ever heard of. But you can write things like ‘dialysis machine’ and ‘Mongolian deathworm’. That’s half the fun – writing totally goofy things and putting them together. You could write ‘dynamite’, ‘glue’ and ‘bacon’ and stick them all together and feed them to a lion if you want.
In just what kind of puzzles would a dialysis machine be really useful?
Well, number one, you could use it as a weight. It’s pretty heavy. It’s electronic too, so you could probably throw it in water and it’d short-circuit, and if there was a shark in the water it could electrocute it. And also it could heal you or somebody else if they were sick.
What kind of words are you actively avoiding?
We don’t have proper nouns, no historical figures, monuments or places. We can’t put in Barack Obama – we don’t own the copyright to Obama. There won’t be any copyrighted words or vulgarities. And no adjectives, either – so you can write ‘bear’ but you can’t write ‘green bear’ or ‘plastic bear’. That’s just the need to keep things simple – we can’t do everything!
How have you made this possible – even just from an art assets point of view?
The art style’s pretty simple, really. The big thing is that we’re not using sprite animation, we’re using 3D Studio Max for the animation – so if you animate one guy’s walk cycle, you can animate all walk cycles without changing them too much. It’s much easier than drawing each unique frame as a sprite.
And on the data side we use this system called Objectnaut. It’s an inheritance system so you can input what an animal would be like, or a mammal, or a small mammal – so you say that all small mammals are under a certain weight, have organic flesh, are interested in food and are afraid of predators and fire. So we put that in on a high level and then go down to the nitty-gritty and say, well, what would a mouse like? A mouse would like cheese, obviously.
The example puzzle currently doing the rounds on the internet is really quite simple – can you give us a sense of where you will take the level design?
We have two different types of levels that we’re aiming for – the casual levels and the core levels. We’re not sure what we’ll call it in the final game but that’s what we’re calling it internally. The casual levels are more like life situations – so, say there’s a piñata; people will know that they need a bat to break it. Or there’s a birthday cake and they’ll know they have to blow out the candles. The core levels are more physics-based, and there are spike pits and flips and switches and electronics – those things that gamers are more used to.
What are the difficulties of coming up with puzzles when you’re using an emergent system that will produce solutions you haven’t necessarily predicted?
That’s the biggest issue. But it’s going to work, regardless of how we would solve it. Due to the inheritance system of Objectnaut, if you write ‘ramp’ and ‘bicycle’ to solve the tree level, and we’ve never thought of that, it will still work. You’ll always be able to ride a bike, and bicycles will always fly off ramps.
We don’t have to playtest a billion different options, it’s all going to be there for you. The thing with the design of the game is that we don’t want players to have a toolset of just ten objects that they always use to beat the levels. Like a gun or an axe or a ladder – we don’t want those to be a default standard.
So we’re making sure that the levels aren’t solved that way – and if they are, there’s always another way that you can think about that we will push you towards.
Thankfully, Scribblenauts looks to fill the gap, a new DS game from 5th Cell, the makers of Drawn To Life and Lock’s Quest. Players solve puzzles by writing in nearly any noun they can think of, and seeing the item appear in the game ready for use. An early demo sees the hero, Maxwell, trying to get a star out of a tree – spawning a ladder at first then, in later attempts, an American football to knock the
star down and a beaver to gnaw through the trunk. We talk to Jeremiah Slaczka, creative director, about the power of words.
Edge: Can you describe how comprehensive the lexicon is?
Slaczka: That’s the million-dollar question that people keep asking me. But if we told you exactly how many words we have it’d be like a magician revealing his tricks – but let’s just say it is incredibly comprehensive. We’re going through dictionaries, encyclopaedias, wikis – everything we can get our hands on. We’ve already spent months and months on this, and until the project ends we’re going to be adding new words and art and new data to go with all that.
There are so many obscure words. There will definitely be things that you could write that you won’t be able to spawn – but those things will never matter, like some eastern Columbian dish that nobody’s ever heard of. But you can write things like ‘dialysis machine’ and ‘Mongolian deathworm’. That’s half the fun – writing totally goofy things and putting them together. You could write ‘dynamite’, ‘glue’ and ‘bacon’ and stick them all together and feed them to a lion if you want.
In just what kind of puzzles would a dialysis machine be really useful?
Well, number one, you could use it as a weight. It’s pretty heavy. It’s electronic too, so you could probably throw it in water and it’d short-circuit, and if there was a shark in the water it could electrocute it. And also it could heal you or somebody else if they were sick.
What kind of words are you actively avoiding?
We don’t have proper nouns, no historical figures, monuments or places. We can’t put in Barack Obama – we don’t own the copyright to Obama. There won’t be any copyrighted words or vulgarities. And no adjectives, either – so you can write ‘bear’ but you can’t write ‘green bear’ or ‘plastic bear’. That’s just the need to keep things simple – we can’t do everything!
How have you made this possible – even just from an art assets point of view?
The art style’s pretty simple, really. The big thing is that we’re not using sprite animation, we’re using 3D Studio Max for the animation – so if you animate one guy’s walk cycle, you can animate all walk cycles without changing them too much. It’s much easier than drawing each unique frame as a sprite.
And on the data side we use this system called Objectnaut. It’s an inheritance system so you can input what an animal would be like, or a mammal, or a small mammal – so you say that all small mammals are under a certain weight, have organic flesh, are interested in food and are afraid of predators and fire. So we put that in on a high level and then go down to the nitty-gritty and say, well, what would a mouse like? A mouse would like cheese, obviously.
The example puzzle currently doing the rounds on the internet is really quite simple – can you give us a sense of where you will take the level design?
We have two different types of levels that we’re aiming for – the casual levels and the core levels. We’re not sure what we’ll call it in the final game but that’s what we’re calling it internally. The casual levels are more like life situations – so, say there’s a piñata; people will know that they need a bat to break it. Or there’s a birthday cake and they’ll know they have to blow out the candles. The core levels are more physics-based, and there are spike pits and flips and switches and electronics – those things that gamers are more used to.
What are the difficulties of coming up with puzzles when you’re using an emergent system that will produce solutions you haven’t necessarily predicted?
That’s the biggest issue. But it’s going to work, regardless of how we would solve it. Due to the inheritance system of Objectnaut, if you write ‘ramp’ and ‘bicycle’ to solve the tree level, and we’ve never thought of that, it will still work. You’ll always be able to ride a bike, and bicycles will always fly off ramps.
We don’t have to playtest a billion different options, it’s all going to be there for you. The thing with the design of the game is that we don’t want players to have a toolset of just ten objects that they always use to beat the levels. Like a gun or an axe or a ladder – we don’t want those to be a default standard.
So we’re making sure that the levels aren’t solved that way – and if they are, there’s always another way that you can think about that we will push you towards.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
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Subscribe To Edge Magazine / Corrections / Terms & Conditions / Privacy Policy
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
I'm generally a huge fan of customisation, especially games that allow players to interfere in gameplay rather than appearances.
I'm looking forward to this. It's ambitious, but should be simple for the player. I think it'd be great to play this game with someone else looking over my shoulder giving me suggestions. And this is another way that players can generate their own gameplay.