A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Jeremiah Slaczka, one of 5th Cell's co-founders...

GS: I sat down with the Scribblenauts level editor to make some action levels. But when your player has access to everything on Earth it's pretty hard to make a challenging level. Can you talk about the difficulty of making action levels vs. puzzle levels and why the two separate classes exist?

JS: Making levels for a game where people can write tens of thousands of words that could break your level instantly or come up with solutions you've never thought of is very difficult. Our designers had a very hard time thinking outside of the box to come up with 220 unique puzzles.

With action levels it's hard not to fall into old ruts of platform gaming or puzzle switches and gates type gameplay when as a designer your brain is trained that way. In puzzle levels the challenges where making logic that everyone could get, different regions, backgrounds and upbringings meant not everyone was familiar with all the nuances of certain cultures in a game that was going to ship around the world. So we had to design in very broad strokes which made narrowing down concepts difficult.

We separated the game into two types of levels because we wanted something that was logically challenging -- puzzle -- for non-gamers and gameplay challenging -- action -- for the gamers. You can play only puzzle levels or only action levels and still beat the game. The title screen, which is a complete toy sandbox for non-gamers, rounded out the experience.