"Once the ball started rolling it only took a couple months," Slaczka says. The proposal made its way back to Japan for approval, and Nintendo icon Shigeru Miyamoto even gave some input about how the characters should be implemented. As was recently announced, the Wii U version of Unlimited features characters and objects from both the Mario and Zelda series, an idea 5th Cell thought up and proposed to Nintendo of America just before E3 2012. That just took a lot of time and effort and learning the Wii U's APIs and SDK and stuff like that."ĥth Cell enjoys a close relationship with Nintendo - as Slaczka happily points out, it's one of the rare western developers that's laid its hands on Nintendo's intellectual property. We eventually got it up to 60 frames per second. They'd send their SDK and try to be as heads up as possible and be like 'this stuff's really early it could change a lot.' There were times really early on with the dev kits where things would be running at like 10 frames per second. "Nintendo kept on shipping them over and we'd send back the older ones constantly. new kinds of dev kits - alpha, beta, different versions," Slaczka recalls excitedly.
Even crunch time was merciful: 5th Cell lists a "limited crunch philosophy" on its website, and Slaczka says the dev team stuck to that on Unlimited by staggering the delivery dates of the PC, 3DS and Wii U versions. There were no huge roadblocks, no catastrophes. we were like 'OK, well, this broke this but we knew it was going to break we got a heads up early on.' It was pretty par for the course I guess." "There were times really early on with the dev kits where things would be running at like 10 frames per second. But Slaczka is cavalier as he talks about Unlimited's development on unfamiliar hardware.
An October 2012 installment of Nintendo's Iwata Asks series revealed that Nintendo R&D used 3D printers to prototype different designs for the GamePad and hand-carved those models to nail down its form-factor.Įven when Nintendo sent 5th Cell dev kits, about a year before launch, the hardware had plenty of revisions left to go. It was a carved, wooden mockup that Nintendo used to convey the gist of the tablet/controller hybrid. When 5th Cell first laid eyes on the GamePad, it wasn't functional hardware. saw it a couple weeks later or something like that, and agreed, and we just moved forward and started working on the game itself." and then the GamePad came out and we're like 'Well, we should just go with this instead this makes a lot more sense,'" explains Slaczka.
The arrival of the GamePad was a stroke of luck. The studio spent nearly a year on the game, grappling with the challenge of a pointer-friendly keyboard, before the Wii U came along. Nintendo timed its visit well: 5th Cell was already developing a Scribblenauts game for Wii, trying to translate the DS game's stylus-based writing into something that worked well with a Wii Remote. "We're very close to Nintendo and we've done very well on their platform, so they came by and showed us a prototype of the Wii U and said 'What do you think about it?'" "We were actually, I think, the first North American developers to see the Wii U," begins Slaczka, as he lays out the history of Unlimited's development over the phone. And if the Wii U hadn't come along, Scribblenauts Unlimited may have been a dramatically different game. Listening to Creative Director Jeremiah Slaczka describe the development process, though, those milestones sound more exciting than frightening.
Scariest of all, Scribblenauts Unlimited isn't just a Wii U game - it's launching simultaneously on Wii U and 3DS and hitting PC a mere week later. It's 5th Cell's first major console release, in fact: the developer has never shipped a game on a disc. It's the first launch title 5th Cell has created, meaning it's the first time it's dealt with the headaches and unknowns of pre-release hardware. Though the studio has been developing games for nearly 10 years, Scribblenauts Unlimited represents a trio of intimidating milestones. 5th Cell has released a Scribblenauts in September or October for the past three years, and there's only one reason the fourth game in the series is coming out a tad later this year, on November 13th: It's a launch title for Nintendo's Wii U.įor 5th Cell, this is new. Series protagonist Maxwell and his magic notebook (where he thinks up objects and uses them to solve puzzles) are becoming holiday staples, even if they don't attract the attention of Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed. Like clockwork, as blasts of red and orange signal the arrival of fall, independent developer 5th Cell releases a Scribblenauts game.