To make a long story short, not every game I cook up and prototype turns out to be a winner. Some of them don’t even make it past an early prototype. This idea, though, I really really liked. It just seemed (in my head) that it should be fun. The concept, in a nutshell: Nibblets (link opens pop for more sizey goodness). The name really has nothing to do with the gameplay, other than the levels. I had an idea for an amorphous blob of goo, which could only move by firing pieces of itself in the opposite direction (meaning if you want to go right, fire a chunk to the left). Every time the user changed their direction of motion (once moving, you keep moving), the main blob would shrink a little. Eventually it would be too small and no more moves would be possible.

This part, I’m convinced, would still work for a pretty cool puzzle game. Here’s where I flubbed it up, though. I thought: “How cool would it be if your pieces kept bouncing around and you could gather them back up?” This is what’s prototyped below. While thinking about levels to use, I suddenly remembered the game Nibbles–a basic snake game I used to play all the time in high school. Written in QBasic, it was essentially my introduction to programming. I found a copy of the code and mostly-faithfully (minor size tweaks were needed) reproduced those original 10 levels to act as a backdrop to the game listed above.

The result? Booooooring. As I mentioned, I think this concept could really have legs as a puzzle game. Instead of a sequence of tokens, seed the board with a bunch to begin with. Make firing a blob permanent (no reclamation) and layout the levels with enough angled pieces to make things interesting. The game then becomes a resource-management/maze-thing–more like the penguins-sliding-on-ice style of games.