Since Drawful 2 and the studio's other party games are played primarily with smartphones, the developers didn't want people to have to pick up a controller and log into the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live or Steam just to be able to write questions.Ĭreation works similarly to the way you actually play Drawful 2. Jackbox also wanted to make the actual creation process as simple as possible. 'Like, you could write a bad Drawful prompt, but anything you put in there is going to be a possible Drawful prompt. 'It'd be difficult to make a Drawful prompt that doesn't work at all,' said Niekamp. The questions in the Fibbage games, for example, involve actual facts - the developers have to do research in order to write questions, answers and 'lie' answers, and then categorize the questions under fields such as 'Johnny Depp' and 'middle school.' It's a complicated, cumbersome process that most players aren't likely to bother with.ĭrawful 'questions,' on the other hand, are simply words or phrases. Niekamp told Polygon that players of Jackbox's games have long requested the ability to make custom content, but he and Evan Jacover, Jackbox's vice president of engineering, both explained that Drawful is uniquely suited to the feature. 'it'd be difficult to make a Drawful prompt that doesn't work at all' 'Because when you're playing Drawful, you're like, 'Well, someone put in a funny joke about Brad, this guy we're playing with, but that's not going to be the right answer.' But now it could be! Because you could've put in some dumb joke about your friend.'

'And so kind of gets us closer to that,' Niekamp continued. The 'ethos' of Drawful is to make it possible for 'any crazy thing that any of the players in the room put in' to be the right answer, said Drawful 2 director Arnie Niekamp in a phone interview. That's why giving players the ability to write their own prompts is so meaningful in a game like Drawful. So while your answer might make everyone in the room laugh because it makes fun of that teacher you all hated in high school, anybody who actually wants to win the game won't pick it. Points are awarded to the players who guess correctly, as well as to the writers of wrong answers that people select instead. Finally, the game presents each drawing and every user-submitted answer for it - along with the right answer - and the players have to guess the original prompt. Then the game shows each person's drawings to all the other players, who have to write down what they think the drawing is supposed to be. Three to eight players are each presented with a word or phrase, and they have to sketch a drawing of that concept on their smartphone or tablet.

In case you haven't played the original Drawful, here's how it works. If the phrase 'user-generated content' turns you off because it makes you think of creating LittleBigPlanet levels, fret not: If you understand how Drawful works, you can write Drawful questions. For a company whose games can be played by anyone with a smartphone, it's not surprising that the feature in Drawful 2 is designed with ease of use in mind. It's the first time Jackbox has supported user-generated content in one of its games, and to hear the studio tell it, Drawful was the perfect title in which Jackbox could experiment with this feature. Jackbox Games is capitalizing on that in Drawful 2, the sequel to the studio's 2014 drawing game, with a big new feature: the ability to write your own prompts. Party games are best played with people you know, gathered together in a room, where everything can take on a deeper, funnier meaning because of your shared experiences.

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