Bill Sithiro

Here’s a game I wrote in Silverlight 2.0 that is a clone of the old-school classic Nibbler. If you never played or heard of Nibbler, you’re either too young; as it was released in 1982, or you never hanged out in many arcades as a child.

Nibbler was originally the first game to feature a billion point scoring system, which at the time I guess was even more important than graphics. In fact, I believe someone did manage to reach the billion point after playing the game straight for more than 48 hours!

For a long time, I pondered on the game design and mechanics of Nibbler; you know it isn’t the best game out there (in the eyes of most) it’s rather dull. However, it is certainly the fastest game you’ll ever experience. I can’t think of any other game that allows you to complete a level in 2 or 3 seconds! Yes, it gets that fast! There’s only a handful of levels that repeat over and over yet all of us (me and my friends) just wanted to play the game more and more, as if we suffered from an OCD to play this game until we dropped. And sometimes we would, after a dozen hours or so.

But the interesting thing about Nibbler is it allowed the dedicated soul to play the game for endless hours. Once you figured out the patterns for each maze, you could clear the maze with your eyes closed, literally. But be a split millisecond too slow and you would crash hard!

My attempt to recreate the game is not so much an attempt to deliver a faithful representation of the game, but to allow you to play it (if you should so decide to do so) for hours upon hours, or days even, and make it as fast as the original. That’s easier said then done, considering the browser containment, performance, memory leaks and constrained only to keyboard input as opposed to an arcade style joystick. So at least, that’s my goal.

My first impression is that I think it might be finally possible with Silverlight, but it’s going to be tricky. Note, the entire game is XAML based and designed to play in a 1000×1000 pixel canvas! So the fidelity of the game is quite… HD and therefore performance issues lurking. There’s also some crazy cool control template stuff going on in regards to the levels. I might however start looking into a raster based version in Silverlight 3 when it’s released.

Well anyway, you can checkout and play the game over at SilverArcade.com.

Thanks,

–Bill Sithiro