Every summer the capelin roll in along our coast, and every summer the puffins go to work. A puffin flies out, dives, packs its beak with little fish, and hauls them home to a puffling waiting in a burrow on the cliff. Then it does it again. And again. All day long.
That's a video game if I ever saw one.
So I made one. Beakful is a one-button game: hold to dive, let go to rise. You're an Atlantic puffin off the Newfoundland coast, feeding your puffling from morning until nightfall. Catch capelin, stack them in your beak, get home before the little one gets too hungry, and don't get eaten along the way.
It wasn't called Beakful at first. It was Capelin Run, then Fun Puffin (which is also the name of my new website, so that got confusing fast), and finally Beakful: A Puffin Game. The name finally says what the game is about: a beak, full.
From the very first version I set a rule for myself. Everything in the game is drawn in code. No image files, no sound files. The puffin, the waves, the seals, the sunset, even the sound of a fish going down the hatch are all made on the fly. The whole game fits in one file you can open in a browser.
That first version had six levels, seals and thieving gulls, and a puffin that flapped around in a way I thought was very convincing. It was not.
Losing is quick and gentle. One tap and you're flying again. The puffling chirps at you. And a lot of the game is just Newfoundland: the place names, the fish, the weather, and the puffins themselves.
Next log: the last few days, when the puffin got a wardrobe.
