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Sliced Gaming Feature: Drawn To Life Developer Interview

Writer: Nick Schaedel
Posted: 25th July 2006, 5:33pm

Not everyone can draw well. Thankfully, regardless of your artistic abilities, a new game by 5th Cell will breathe life into your creations...literally! We sat down with Jeremiah Slaczka, the creative director at 5th Cell, for a talk about the ambitious premise.


Nick Schaedel: First of all, thanks for doing this interview!

Jeremiah Slaczka: Thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure.

NS: Can you please give us an outline on what 5th Cell has previously worked on?

JS: We’ve been around about 3 years working mostly in the mobile phone space. THQ published our first three original titles; SEAL Team 6, Siege and Mini Poccha. After that we continued to work with THQ and other publishers on mobile titles like Full Spectrum Warrior: Mobile and Moto GP Manager.

We’re also finishing up a cross-platform casual game called D.N.A. It will launch for PC during the summer.

NS: So, what made you want to give DS development a shot?

JS: Well, original IP has always been our main focus, while we’ve done some contract titles in the past, our passion really lies in creating our own worlds, characters and ideas. Although mobile has been very good to us, we felt the best way to get our original ideas out was to get on a platform primarily suited to games.

DS is just an awesome system; we were psyched about when it was first announced at E3 two years ago.

NS: What is the basic gameplay concept behind Drawn to Life?

JS: The concept behind Drawn to Life is really simple; your drawings come to life! And people really seem to get that idea. Everyone has doodled on paper and we thought "How cool it would be to see player creations come alive." The hard part was designing systems to give players the freedom to create but having the game logic to understand and translate the drawing into a playable character.

NS: What features of the DS will you be using? Obviously, the touch screen plays a big role, but anything else?

JS: When I was initially designing the game I wanted to focus on one aspect of the DS and really make it stand out. With Drawn to Life the touch screen became that focus. So that’s what is played up a lot, and in more ways than just drawing, but I can’t talk about what other cool things you’ll be able to do with it quite yet.

NS: Can you give us an overview of the story in the game?

JS: The story is about a little village that is slowly dying with only a few inhabitants left. They’ve forsaken their Creator, and arrogantly trashed their village, causing a villager exodus of sorts. The few that are left ask you, the Creator, to come back and help them bring their village back to life, which will hopefully entice all those who abandoned the village to come back as well.

NS: What's the ultimate aim of the game?

JS: To bring back all that was lost in your village. And we’re planning to have a (continued next page)