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You're branching out in terms of your
publisher interaction right now. How is that going?
JS: With Scribblenauts, we talked to
almost every major publisher. We chose WB because they're really large and they
have a lot of money and they want to do a lot, and really want to be a player,
but they're really new. They have the fervor of a much smaller publisher who's
like, "Look, we'd totally be behind your game but we don't have money! We're
sorry." WB had the best of both worlds.
Large
companies figure, "Eh, we have 20 original IPs already. We don't really
need your IP." Warner Bros. embraced it. They've been totally awesome. I
don't know if you went to Germany at GamesCom, but half of WB's
booth was Scribblenauts. That's never
happened before. That's like Nintendo-esque.
Nobody
does that for a DS game only. It's DS game only. It's not a multi-SKU or
anything. They've really, really embraced it. There's been a big marketing push
and stuff. But it's also grassroots. They basically saw it. They saw the press
and the fans getting into it, and they were like, "Hey, wait. We have
something really good on our hands." I think we made the right decision
with WB. And we're also doing Drawn to
Life: The Next Chapter with THQ.
Again, this is another PR thing that people think I say, but it's totally
freaking true. We don't do products that we don't believe in. We're not a
company that's has the mentality of, "Give me money because I just want
money." We didn't do Drawn to Life
Wii because we didn't believe in it in the sense that it could be done at a
very good scale. But THQ wanted to do it, so it's like, "Okay, if you want
to do it, that's fine. You guys own it. Do whatever you want with it. That's
fine."
As far as
us, it's like we weren't 100 percent. Especially if that's going to be our
first console title? We didn't want to do it. And [Drawn to Life] SpongeBob? We didn't do SpongeBob. We turned that
down. We could easily have just re-skinned it. With SpongeBob, if THQ wants to
do that, that's fine, but it's not our thing. We can say that proudly, because
we pick and choose what we want to do.
So, we
really did want to do Drawn to Life 2
because we felt there was still more to do. The story is just way deeper. I'm
really, really proud of the story. I really hope you play it and play the whole
story. I'd love your opinion on it. I'm actually really proud of the story. Scribblenauts has no story, but with Drawn to Life 2, I'm really, really
proud of the story. The art is all hand-drawn by Edison, who did the Scribblenauts stuff, so he hand-drew all these different villages
and stuff like that. It looks really beautiful.
He's really got a good style.
JS: And his depth. He did Lock's Quest,
he did Drawn to Life. He goes
everywhere. It's crazy. I've never seen an artist that does that.
And the hero. You can add limbs, remove limbs, resize them, and stuff like
that. The gameplay, we've actually had a lot more designers. We hired like a
whole team of like five guys that are just doing levels. The original one just
had one guy. We really just beefed it up every way we could.
We
figured, if we're gonna make this thing, we're not just going to port, get us a
little money, and then we'll make the backend again. We sunk all our money into
it. We sunk our money into Scribblenauts
as well. This is publisher-funded, but the publisher said, "Well, here's
this money." And at a certain point we had a couple more months, and
decided to just spend money because we wanted to polish it. It's kind of a
Valve mentality, like, "We'll get it out when we can." Of course, we
don't have 10 years like Valve does to make an episode. [laughs]
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But he's also pretty accurate at picking out a game's problems most of the time, and he doesn't base his views on the advertising inches the publisher has bought from him. It also doesn't take genius to spot obvious flaws, it has to be said. :)
My point was that Scribblenauts is flawed. Great idea. Badly implemented. I don't get any feeling that the guys behind Scribblenauts in any way get that the game has these glaring flaws, which is easy to miss / overlook when you sell bucket loads of a product. So I personally think Croshaw's comments are a fair rebuttal to what is also quite a "tiresome, repetitive, smug" interview above. :)
Trust me, we follow all reviews and understand the game wasn't perfect. As Jeremiah said in the interview, one of our biggest gripes is lack of development time to move our stuff from a 80s metacritic average into the 90's. That 10 points is all polish.
@Jeffrey : Oh, I actually agree with you. I hate the rinse - repeat - churn out format of the big publishers. And applaud anyone who tries something new, regardless of it's commercial success or not. And yes I guess it seems harsh that when someone does something original and then misses the mark a bit that we all jump on them. But I think developers would rather have honest feedback than fawning admiration. Well, I know I certainly would rather it that way.
My criticism was of the implementation, not the concept (which is awesome).
I certainly did not advise people not to buy it. I think anyone reading here is very likely to make their own mind up regardless of any comment made here. So comments I make are based on the premise that we're all professionals and as such don't need to embellish our words with twinkly bits to mind people's egos.
My only hope is that the concept gets refined and implemented better in a revision or new release, and my comments were because I feel the game is being sold on the concept whereas the implementation disappoints somewhat. I say these things because I care about the Art, not the publisher - to be perfectly frank.
If you take a look at the implementation that people behind PixelJunk put into their ideas I would say that is a good yard arm to measure your attempt to hit the concept / implementation sweet spot. :)