New Nintendo DS Game -- Create Any Object You Can Think Of | Hacker News Reader

New Nintendo DS Game -- Create Any Object You Can Think Of

joystiq.com

40 pointsnoaharc10 comments

>Andrew created a teleporter in an attempt to instantly apparate to the Starite -- instead, it took him to a medieval world where he was besieged by shadowy assassins. He tried distracting them with candy -- really, Andrew? -- then created a fairly anachronistic nuke. The nuke didn't detonate, however, so andrew created a laser rifle to take out the assassins. One of his lasers grazed the aforementioned WMD, and blew up the entire level.

If the game can consistently do things like that and actually keep the gameplay fresh, it will be amazing. But I'm worried that after spending more than 15 minutes with it, the facade will fade away and a few underlying patterns will start to show. I would love to be wrong, of course.

>>Justin fed the man pomegranates until he fell victim to an overstuffed slumber. He created some lemonade, which the man then poured down his gullet -- level complete! Randy created a coffee shop. It appeared, the man ordered a cup o' joe at the carry-out window, drank it -- level complete!

I'm very interested about the freshness. Speculation: did they take a load of probable phrases from the dictionary and describe how each will function in the level? If the objects are to interact with each other at all, the data necessary seems to grow too quickly. So, I'd like to see how (and to what degree) they were able to describe this much of the real world.

My understanding is that you can create any object in the database at any time, that the objects interact with each other according to general rules, and that they have on the order of 10,000 objects.

But the example you gave...it sounds like all you need to do is give the guy something to drink. It's nice that you can do that with lemonade or water or a coffee shop, but I don't think it will be fun if it's not challenging, and that doesn't sound challenging.

It's cool to see this hit HN; one of my good friends has been staying up late writing code for this game. http://chuckskoda.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEUbtgpIgo

but you know...we need photo-realistic graphics to enjoy our games >_> I don't understand the obsession with doing realistic things in ever more realistic settings when it seems preferable to do insane things in impossible settings.

It's impossible to overstate how much this game became the talk of the press lounge on the last day of E3. People are rooting for this game the way they rooted for Katamari and Portal. There's a lot of love for the depth of the database, but the gameplay has to make sure it doesn't feel like a gimmick by level 220 (or 270 - I've seen conflicting reports).

When I saw Scribblenauts on E3 coverage my thought was immediately:

I want to stop everything I'm doing and make a game quite like this, but for the iPhone or Flash and allow anyone to make things for it (like a wiktionary of 2d "mobs" and items).

The video I liked most was: http://revision3.com/coop/showfloor/#seek=636:839

Of course, I've got too much on my plate to do that right now, so maybe someone else will. :)

This makes me want to go play nethack.

> In all of these scenes, only a few items we tried to create didn't appear.

That's not "any object you can think of", is it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com