Secret Behind Scribblenauts’ Innumerable Dictionary Revealed
A lot of people who were able to play Scribblenauts’ dinky demo kiosk at Warner Bros. E3 booth were taken aback at how vast the game’s “vocabulary,” for lack of a better word, was. It was practically impossible to stump the darn thing, and every single word I threw at it (as long as it wasn’t a proper noun) just amazingly came to life and worked. So how did they do this? Complicated computer algorhythms? Black magic? Nay, 5th Cell just hired a bunch of folks to research words manually. That’s it.
Although it wasn’t all hard manual labor that produced Scribblenauts’ verbally-generated and well-interacting creatures (I was told that they researched features and properties first, and then built the words list from that), Jeremiah Slaczka told G4 that they had five people scour dictionaries, Wikipedia, and linguist sites for six entire months to build up the fantastic database of words Scribblenauts can rec0gnize. “With the technology, we just basically said we’re going to take all the base things like fire and temperature and gravity and physics and we’re just going to put it down there and the game’s going to take all that and know exactly what to do with it. We don’t have to program anything. If a bear is hungry and wants honey, we don’t have to program that — it’s going to know that already.”
So that explains it. Either way, I’m still calling voodoo. Scribblenauts is coming to the Nintendo DS September 15th courtesy of Drawn to Life developers 5th Cell and Warner Interactive; which reminds me: it would be awesome if Warner could sneak in a couple of characters from their franchise cache into the game!
Scribblenauts Screenshot Gallery:
Source: G4TV.com
