Developer 5th Cell has already shown that they are extremely capable of creating fun and original titles with DS games like Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest. Their latest title, Scribblenauts, gives players an unprecedented amount of freedom in solving puzzles. A mind-boggling array of objects can be summoned into play by simply writing down their name. Nintendo World Report recently had the chance to chat with Jeremiah Slaczka, Creative Director of Scribblenauts, about their innovative new game, Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, and the developer's plans for the future.

Nintendo World Report (NWR): Could you talk a bit about how Scribblenauts came into being?

Jeremiah Slaczka (JS): I had some other concepts for games. Lock's Quest was one of them, that was building blocks. And then I had another basic concept, which was writing words. It was actually writing sentences, and then they would come to life so you could write, "The dog was running through the forest" or whatever on the bottom screen, and on the top screen you would have it actually happen. I was like, "That's kind of boring because it's just like an interactive story" so after that I paired it with a puzzle idea where you would have infinite replay because there would be small puzzles, but you could write anything to solve them, so the replay would continually be on you, on the way you wanted to do it, and that was basically the idea. And then I showed it to our technical director, and our technical director was like, "Dude, we can totally do this. It's a great idea." Because a lot of people were like, "This is impossible. How do you write everything? How's it all going to work?" And he saw it technically, he saw the vision, he was like, "Yeah, this makes a lot of sense."

NWR: Very cool. I understand one of the ways you guys were able to fit so many objects in the game was using a system or a tool called…

JS: …Objectnaut.

NWR: Yes. Yes. Objectnaut. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JS: Yeah, it's an in-house tool that we created specifically for the game, and it basically has properties of everything that's in the game, you know, like physics, and health, and buoyancy, and, you know, how does fire, lightning, electricity, anything you can think of, air, anything that's in the world, you know is a dirigible going to explode? What does it like, what does it dislike. Anything that you can think of, there are properties for it, and then basically it allowed our designers to tweak anything on a micro level or a macro level. They could basically set all mammals, they could say, "all mammals are going to be like this", but then if they want, "Well, the elephant is afraid of mice so I'll make sure that happens." You can tweak anything. And what's cool about the result is that there is so much in the game that we don't even know, as creators, how it's going to turn out. We don't know how you're going to solve a level. So basically we give you the tools, and then you can solve the levels the way you want.

NWR: Were there any objects that, for some unforeseen reason, just wouldn't work that you had really wanted to include in the game?

JS: No, every object works the way it should. The only objects we couldn't get in the game are celebrities and like, copyrighted stuff, which I would love to do, but it's just the world we live in, you can't. But it would be totally awesome to have like, light sabers and Chuck Norris and stuff like that, but we couldn't get that in so that is the only thing I really regret, but you can't do anything anyways.

NWR: Even though you don't have any celebrities you did get some famous people from the past like Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and such.

JS: Yeah. What we really wanted to do, you know, we're all fans of video games and stuff, I mean just because we make games doesn't mean we don't love games, so we're all about that humor and style and just being silly and stupid. If it's cool we wanted it in the game. You know we have things that don't exist in real life, like laser guns and invisibility cloaks, and it's like those aren't real, but they're too cool not to have. There are robot dinosaurs and everything.

NWR: Are there any developers that you guys really look up to?

JS: I love Valve. Valve is awesome. They're very different than us because we're all about original-style games, and they're all about taking a genre, and polishing it very, very, very well, you know, take the FPS genre, and then just make awesome episodic content and stuff like that, whereas we're just some crazy idea, but I love how they run their development. Level 5 is really cool in Japan. It's kind of weird that we're like the same name. Yeah, they're really awesome. And Blizzard is amazing of course, and even Nintendo. Nintendo makes some good stuff. I mean Miyamoto, Miyamoto's like my favorite game designer, he is just awesome. I hope to crush him one day. (laughs) But he's awesome. He's awesome.

NWR: In Scribblenauts, the main character Maxwell needs to collect a Starite to complete each puzzle stage. Is that in anyway influenced by Super Mario 64?

JS: A little. I mean a little. Not completely, it was more like just a MacGuffin. What I wanted with the game. People were like, "Why don't you have a big story in the game?" because all of our other games have stories, deep stories, especially for a DS game, but I didn't want that because I wanted a game where anybody can get in and just play instantly, and so with the starite it's like, "I have to collect the MacGuffin. I get that instantly." So you can easily explain it to someone who is not even a gamer, "This is fun. I want to play this." Whereas, if it was these crazy objectives and stuff, people wouldn't really understand, "There is too much story. I don't really want to play this. It's not my type of game."

NWR: Scribblenauts hasn't needed much advertising so far thanks to being named the E3 Game of the Show by numerous publications, as well as things like Post 217 on NeoGAF. Now the game has a very cool TV advertisement that will soon be airing. Is there anything else you are doing to advertise the game and get the word out?

JS: Yeah, totally. There [are] print ads and that TV ad is going to be everywhere, and of course this launch event and Warner Bros., that's why we chose Warner Bros. We went through -- basically every publisher on the planet has seen Scribblenauts, and we were talking with a lot of them, and we decided that Warner Bros. was the best one because they're new to the game scene, but not new obviously in general, so they have a lot of money, and they want to be a big player, but they don't have a lot of original content yet, so they're really, really hungry to kind of push us forward, and so obviously we have a strategy guide and this launch event. I've never done a launch event before. Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest, they didn't have launch events like this so obviously WB really wants to get behind us. That's why we chose them, and we chose right I think.

NWR: I heard that you included a poster of Post 217 in the strategy guide.

JS: Yes it is. You have to get it. It's awesome. It's big.

NWR: Would you mind speaking a little bit about your sequel to Drawn to Life?

JS: Yeah, absolutely. That's coming out, I believe, October 25th in America. I think in Europe it might be a little later; I'm not sure though. It's definitely in October. We're doing the DS one only. It's a direct sequel to the original. It's completely blown out. As a company we only do original stuff so we don’t do games unless we believe in them. We don't do them for money. There are a lot of companies that are like, "Yeah, I'll just do a game for money and give me the license." We don't do that, we refuse projects all day. We didn't do Sponge Bob: Drawn to Life because we were like, "We don't do that. We only make original games." So with Drawn to Life 2 we really felt that there was sequel material that would make the game better. So first we took Edison's art, Edison Yan who did Drawn to Life art, he did Scribblenauts' art, but it's all hand-drawn, so all the worlds are hand-drawn now which looks amazing. We have actually had people that have said the game is the best looking DS game they've seen, it's really beautiful and Paul Robertson is animating everything. I don't know if you know Paul Robertson. He's a famous internet dude. Type him into Google. He's got some crazy YouTube videos. And the story, I'm really really proud of the story, 'cause Scribblenauts didn't have a story and I have a screenwriting background, so I really wanted to tell a good story, and I think Drawn to Life is the best story that I've done on a DS game so far. I was really proud of Lock's Quest, but I've learned a lot from those two games on how [to] tweak stuff, and Drawn to Life DS has a really awesome story. The Wii [version] has a completely different story, it's a completely different developer, a completely different game.

NWR: Are you keeping an eye on the Wii game at all?

JS: Yeah. Every once in a while, but still, it's their game. It's their development. We were doing our own thing. [In the DS sequel] you can edit your hero, you can add limbs, remove limbs, you can resize them and stuff like that, so we're really proud of it. It's not a game that is getting as much hype, but I'm still very proud of it. I mean everybody is. We worked very hard. On the first game we had like one level designer and now we have five so we basically tried to make everything better and I really think it is.

NWR: How big is the team right now?

JS: We have about forty people.

NWR: And how many people, just to compare, worked on the original Drawn to Life?

JS: That's forty in house. We also have artists off-site. The original was about fifteen on-site and maybe some more artists here and there and stuff like that.

NWR: Any chance you could talk about what's next for 5th Cell?

JS: Yeah, we're doing console. We're getting into console. We're not abandoning DS in the sense that we'll never do it again, but for right now we're moving into console. That's where we always started [our] company. I started the company six years ago with our Technical Director, and Joe our General Manager, so we're doing console next year and it will be original. We always do original stuff. You won't see licensed stuff. I mean you might see licensed stuff in the sense like a Mario game that's original or something like that. We're not doing that, but I'm just saying I would. I would do that, but not like a movie license or something dumb. I like how Bioware did the Star Wars RPG, it wasn't like "Oh we're just making a Star Wars game. No, we're taking the license and making something really awesome with it."

NWR: They made their own story.

JS: Exactly. And I would love to do that, but other than that, you know, that's what we're doing.

NWR: Since we're a Nintendo site, I've got to ask if you are developing a game for the Wii.

JS: That's one of the consoles. We're actually working on multiple consoles. There's multiple titles.

NWR: Multiple titles?

JS: Yes, and Wii is one of them.

NWR: Great. Thank you very much.

JS: My pleasure.

Big thanks to Jeremiah Slaczka and the fine folks at Warner Bros. Interactive for the interview!