“What’s cool is your friends can all look at it, so while you’re writing, that’s why we don’t have the write-mode up. “People say, ‘Well I should be looking at the screen,’ and I’m like ‘Well, why? Should you?’ Are you having fun either way?” he explained, saying that he doesn’t feel the player should be confined to either of the screens. Asked whether he felt it was a problem, he said it’s something he’s actually asked quite often. While previewing the game, I caught myself watching the GamePad and almost completely ignoring the television screen. With Scribblenauts Unlimited, the Wii U gamepad mirrors what’s displayed on the screen. Getting back on track, Slaczka said, “With the Wii U we’ve been able to make the game way bigger, because with the object creation-putting all that stuff together-the DS just can’t handle all that stuff…even the Wii couldn’t handle it, but the horse-power of this can really handle it.” The increased resolution of the high-definition console also means that the developers can fit more information and objects onto the screen at once. There’s so many objects-I think that’s like tsunami, or something.” “For a couple of years I’ve been wanting to do something like this, and the Wii U is also really, really powerful-Oh, that’s cool,” Slaczka said, pointing at one displays on the show floor as he was momentarily distracted by a demo unit in which the game showed a rolling wave of water that submerged the lower half of the screen, “I haven’t even seen that. “We’ve kind of had this in the pipe for a while,” said Slaczka. Object creation isn’t a new idea to the developer. So I wanted to do something where, literally, you could write anything, and share with friends, all this.” That’s part of the reason 5th Cell chose the name Unlimited for the latest Scribblenauts game, “because you have unlimited objects now.”

“We’ve always wanted to do all those things at once, but in game development it’s just too much.

“The first one, obviously, is just write anything, the second one is adjectives, and the third one is now object creation,” said Slaczka. With each iteration, the series has added increasingly more.

Scribblenauts demo