If you’ve seen anything of Scribblenauts Unlimited – though, given the series’ DS heritage, there’s every chance you haven’t yet – you’ll know it looks like exactly the sort of barely-contained, blue sky sandbox plaything to benefit most from being plugged into Steam’s player-driven ideas factory.
Unlimited builds of the series’ core, key mechanic – which sees players will objects, concepts and sentient beings into existence by typing out their names – by adding a tool for the creation of new objects.
The Object Editor allows players to design every part of a new creation’s aesthetic by combining smaller objects, and even define its scripting rules (and thereby its dynamic behaviour when presented with other objects in-game).
At a pre-PAX demo with Polygon today, Scribblenauts creator Jeremiah Slaczka and producer Brittany Aubert demonstrated the Editor by assembling a ‘Hotdogatops’ – a facsimile dinosaur sporting ketchup bottles for horns and spawning hot dogs on expiration.It’s these creations that will be swapped on Steam Workshop.
Mouse control is reportedly smooth, there’s a choice between WASD and click-to-move for directing protagonist Max, and access to a proper QWERTY keyboard naturally lends itself toScribblenauts’ quickfire noun-spawning.
Slaczka wouldn’t comment on whether developer 5th Cell have any TF2 object crossovers planned with Valve. But a Pyroceraptor seems like a no-brainer to us.