The latest issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a postmortem of 5th Cell's Scribblenauts, written by studio co-founder Joseph Tringali.
Scribblenauts, a unique word-driven puzzle platformer, was the third original Nintendo DS property from Bellevue-based 5th Cell. Its widely-discussed main hook is the ability for players to enter nearly any conceivable non-proper noun into its text parser, at which point the game will spawn that item into the world.
The following excerpts from Game Developer magazine's recent postmortem, published in the November 2009 issue, illustrate how Sucker Punch grappled with localization and control issues to ship the ambitious game.
Scribblenauts has long been a series lauded for its wealth of adjectives and nouns. Sometimes, it's astounding to discover exactly how far this can go, and that's why we have gone to the trouble of scouring for the most obscure and curious words that somehow yield results.
Matt from FuzzyPixels presents a list of the top five puzzle games of all time, as well as handing out a couple of special awards.
Having recently found out about Scribblenauts, the fate of 5th Cell is hard to witness.
the problem of scribblenauts is that it just couldn't work on Playstation/Xbox... Nintendo, PC and Mobile was not enough to support the franchise
Why wouldn't it? Think it would work great with the PlayStation second screen app. Doesn't Xbox have something similar too? Use the phone or tablet to type and the controller to play.
I'm not real sure a 2nd screen is even necessary. I've only played the DC Comics one, but they could have easily mapped all of the buttons from the touch screen to a controller to pull up the menus.....
