He, not surprisingly, seizes the opportunity to make a monumental mistake by sketching a DoodleBob, which proceeds to grab the remaining pencil and wreak havoc. The story begins when Patrick finds a set of pencils dropped from far above Bikini Bottom. The element of DIY (Draw It Yourself) is a neat feature, but doesn't change the way you progress through the game. The characters and items you draw mesh nicely into the background thanks to an art style in the game that doesn't look overproduced or polished.ĭrawn To Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition follows basic platforming conventions, without a great deal of innovation. There are some cut-scenes that tell the story of 'Bob and his friends working through a bad time in Bikini Bottom, but the majority of the action unfolds at street level with non-stop platforming. There is a lot of theme music within the game, changing at every stage and during special sections. The music and sound effects in Drawn To Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition aren't customizable in the same way as the visuals, but there is the option to replay music through a boom-box in your 'base of operations.' Of course, you get to draw your own house and boom-box. Nothing fundamental has changed about the level or the game's physics, but players immediately have a greater investment in the game and are willing to overlook a lot that normally would not pass muster. There shouldn't be any positive impact on playability from drawing your own enemies, characters, power-ups, and incidental items. The brilliance of a hybrid like Drawn To Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition is in leaving level design to the experts while still allowing players to customize most everything else not bolted down.

We have all gained a great deal of respect for level designers through the process of fiddling with levels in an editor. It is easy to give someone a sandbox and let them build a level, but harder to make a level anyone wants to play. That game's formula for creating art that was incorporated into the main game solved one of the biggest issues with editors. In the case of Drawn To Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition, we see the ultimate anti-boredom tactic: user-generated content.Įditors were about the best we had before Drawn To Life hit the scene. Boredom often comes as a direct result of how games fail to engage us through graphics and sound. In most cases we just weren't attached, out of sheer boredom. The reason hasn't always been that these games were broken or that they completely failed to introduce new mechanics and fresh ideas. Many times in the past, we've seen platforming titles fall on their collective faces, especially those aimed at a younger audience.

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