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5th Cell's new DS game - Scribblenauts (trust me, you want to see this)

by rawmeatcowboy
05 December 2008
GN 1.0 / 2.0

A portion of a massive IGN interview with 5TH Cell’s co-founder and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka…

IGN: So how in the world can you keep track of that all? It has to be just a ridiculous list of assets, and then on top of that comes all the art, the animations, the info for all these interactions Maxwell has wit them. How do you even go about doing something like that. It’s something – when you really think about how limitless the idea is – us unprecedented, and we’re not just talking about “on DS” here…

Miah:Our Technical Director Marius Fahlbusch is one of the founders of the company, so he’s been with us for a longtime obviously. When I told him the idea from the beginning other programmers would have backed away from the idea and said “How are we going to do this?” or “No, this is impossible.” But he was just like “Yeah, we can handle this. We can tackle this concept.” So he got started on a system where everything in the game can be data-driven. We’ve got this tool that we created in-house called “Objectnaut”, so now designers can put in any name of any object, and put in all sorts of data. We’re talking AI properties, physical properties, attraction and repulsion to other objects, weight, size, where it splits, can you pick it up, is it flammable or how do elements effect it… really all these things that you need. We’re spending a great deal of time just imputing tons and tons of these objects, and once we flesh it all out with this Objectnaut system, we have a hierarchy of data.

Let’s look at an elephant, for example. It’s an animal – a mammal – so we know that. It has organic flesh therefore, since every mammal has organic flesh. Now we don’t have to write that in for every animal we make, the system just knows to attach that to anything we label “animal.” We can then look at it and say “organic flesh can… well, it can be eaten, right?”

Full interview here